Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering – Nonlinear Productivity

Job Description:

  • Set the technical direction for the team's agentic systems, including agent orchestration and human-owned steps
  • Discover and prioritize friction across GitLab's software development lifecycle and drive fixes from hypothesis to shipped, measured results
  • Work across GitLab's codebase as required by the problem
  • Apply distributed systems judgment to generated code across concurrency, scale, and deployment topologies
  • Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews and pairing
  • Collaborate with the India-based group several times a week on roadmap alignment
  • Represent technical progress to stakeholders in the CTO organization
  • Own the Technical Leadership hiring round for Staff-level candidates
  • Own the greenfield technical foundation as the team scales

Requirements:

  • 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 ability to read and modify code in the others
  • Track record of delivering results from unclear or incomplete requirements
  • Experience designing evaluation frameworks distinguishing plausible output from correct output
  • Track record of raising the quality bar for a team's output
  • History of unblocking and enabling teammates through design reviews, technical writing, or mentoring
  • Regular engagement with other teams to identify effective collaboration opportunities

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
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