Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps that helps organizations improve developer productivity, operational efficiency, security, compliance, and digital transformation. The Staff Backend Engineer will serve as the technical anchor for the Nonlinear Productivity team, leading agentic systems, distributed systems solutions, technical direction, evaluation frameworks, mentoring, and delivery of greenfield productivity initiatives.
Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction for the team's agentic systems, from how agents are orchestrated to where a step should stay human-owned, and defend those calls once they're tested against real code
- Discover and prioritize sources of friction across GitLab's SDLC, driving the fix — agentic, process-based, or both — from a rough hypothesis through to a shipped, measured result
- Work across any part of GitLab's codebase as the problem requires, since this team operates like a small, generalist group rather than one scoped to a single service
- Apply distributed systems judgment to catch cases where generated code looks correct but breaks under concurrency, at scale, or across deployment topologies (including self-managed, dedicated, and multi-tenant environments), and coach others to do the same
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on agent engineering practices and distributed systems judgment, through design reviews and pairing that raise the team's collective bar rather than just your own output
- Collaborate with the India-based group a few times a week to align on the roadmap, and represent the team's technical progress to stakeholders in the Chief Technology Officer's organization
- Serve as a bar raiser for the team's hiring, owning the Technical Leadership round for other Staff-level candidates as the team scales
- Own a greenfield technical foundation from day one, with your scope and impact free to grow as the team scales
Skills
- Experience building reliable agentic or large language model (LLM)-based systems, including multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery
- Ability to work autonomously in unfamiliar codebases and drive solutions from discovery through completion
- Strong distributed systems and computer science fundamentals, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes, and degradation under load
- Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, with the ability to read and modify code in the others
- A track record of delivering results from unclear or incomplete requirements — able to take a complex, loosely specified problem and decompose it into a concrete proposal of small, shippable steps
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks for systems where "looks plausible" and "is actually correct" are different questions, and a track record of raising the quality bar for a team's output, not just your own
- A history of unblocking and enabling teammates — through design reviews, technical writing, or mentoring — and of engaging regularly with other teams to find where collaboration actually pays off
Benefits
- Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
- All of our roles are remote
Company Overview