Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

*Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Agentic SDLC

An Overview of This Role

GitLab’s Forward Deployed Engineering team is a field-situated product engineering function focused on strategic customer outcomes, AI adoption, and direct contribution back to GitLab’s product. This is not a traditional field engineering, solutions architecture, or professional services role. The Staff Forward Deployed Engineer is expected to operate with deep customer proximity while maintaining the technical bar and contribution discipline of a Staff-level product engineer.

This role exists where strategic customer urgency, complex technical ambiguity, and GitLab product execution intersect. The Staff FDE will work directly with strategic customers, Product, Engineering, Support, SRE, SA, CSA, CSM, and Professional Services to diagnose and resolve high-impact adoption blockers, contribute production-grade fixes and features, and convert learning into repeatable patterns for GitLab and its customers.

The ideal candidate is a Staff-level product or platform engineer with strong Ruby/Rails, Go, systems, DevSecOps, and AI adoption experience who can operate credibly in front of senior customer stakeholders while also contributing directly to GitLab’s core product.

Why This Role Exists

Strategic customers sometimes encounter challenges that are too broad, deep, urgent, or cross-functional for any single existing team to own end-to-end. These challenges may involve product gaps, performance degradation, scale bottlenecks, AI governance, adoption blockers, architectural constraints, Git usage patterns, CI/CD complexity, API automation, security requirements, or operational instability.

FDE provides technical stewardship in these moments. The team does not simply observe, report, or escalate. FDE engages directly, diagnoses the real technical problem, collaborates with the right internal teams, contributes code or technical solutions where appropriate, and transitions the outcome back into normal ownership once the customer is stabilized and the learning is reusable.

Core Responsibilities

Product Contribution

Contribute production-quality code to GitLab’s product and adjacent systems.

Develop bug fixes, features, integrations, tooling, or performance improvements where strategic customer outcomes require direct engineering contribution.

Work within GitLab’s normal product and engineering processes, including issue discovery, MR creation, testing, review, documentation, and maintainability.

Influence Product and Engineering to ensure customer-driven solutions align with long-term product direction and do not become o