Distinguished Engineer, Agentic SDLC & Non-Linear Productivity

Company: GitLab

Job Category: Software Engineering / AI Engineering

Contract Type: Full-Time, Permanent

Location Eligibility: Remote — USA, Canada

Salary: $260,000 – $345,000 USD/year (base; does not include equity or bonuses)

Application Link: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/8537853002

About the Company: GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, trusted by more than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100. It enables organizations to increase developer productivity, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. GitLab operates as a fully remote, async-first company.

Job Description: GitLab is hiring a Distinguished Engineer to pioneer and scale autonomous, agentic SDLC capabilities across the company. Distinguished Engineers are recognized experts across multiple technology domains and represent the most senior level of technical leadership within and across divisions at the company. You will deeply immerse in GitLab's product and internal engineering workflows, identify classes of problems that can be wholly or largely addressed by AI agents, validate them through rigorous experimentation, and codify patterns that can be productized for millions of users.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and continuously refine a company-wide technical vision for autonomous, agentic SDLC aligned with GitLab's product strategy
• Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities across the SDLC targeting 10x step changes, not incremental gains
• Lead hands-on experiments and prototypes to validate where agentic workflows can fully own or reshape engineering tasks (autonomous MR authoring, test creation, security remediation, incident response, etc.)
• Design reference architectures for agentic SDLC, including orchestration patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and human-in-the-loop controls
• Define evaluation frameworks using offline benchmarks and online experiments to measure correctness, latency, safety, cost, and productivity impact
• Work with Product Management and Engineering leadership to convert proven internal patterns into product capabilities for customers
• Mentor Principal and Staff Engineers working on AI and agentic efforts
• Represent GitLab at conferences, standards groups, and open source communities on AI-assisted development and autonomous agents

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leadership role
• Deep expertise in AI/ML systems including LLMs, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflow design at production scale
• Proven track record of leading hands-on technical experimentation and translating findings into scalable architecture decisions
• Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems including service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices for production systems
• Fully remote and async work experience required; excellent written communication skills

Skills Required: LLMs, AI/ML systems, agentic frameworks, distributed systems, MLOps, Python, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), benchmarking, system design, async communication

Benefits: Flexible PTO, equity compensation & ESPP, parental leave, home office support, growth and development fund, health/finance/wellbeing benefits, Team Member Resource Groups