Distinguished Engineer – Agentic SDLC, Non‑Linear Productivity

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +1 more state.

📋 Description

• Establish and consistently enhance a comprehensive technical vision for an autonomous, agentic Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) that aligns with GitLab's product strategy and engineering job framework.

• Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity enhancements throughout the SDLC, from planning and coding to review, security, compliance, and operations, aiming for transformative leaps rather than incremental improvements.

• Convert ambiguous problem domains into clear, actionable roadmaps in collaboration with Product, AI/ML, and Architecture teams.

• Conduct hands-on experiments and develop prototypes to validate how agentic workflows can take ownership of or significantly transform engineering tasks, including autonomous Merge Request (MR) authoring, test creation and triage, security remediation, release readiness, and incident response.

• Design and establish reference architectures for agentic SDLC within GitLab, incorporating orchestration patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and human-in-the-loop controls.

• Create evaluation frameworks utilizing offline benchmarks and online experiments to assess the correctness, latency, safety, cost, and productivity impacts of agentic workflows.

• Select and manage a limited number of high-impact internal use cases as pathfinders, driving them from concept through adoption to measurable productivity improvements.

• Collaborate directly with engineering teams to integrate agentic workflows into everyday development practices, ensuring they are reliable, observable, and resilient.

• Define and monitor essential productivity metrics such as cycle time, Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), and MR throughput, linking agentic initiatives to tangible business results.

• Document and standardize reusable patterns, libraries, and playbooks that can be easily adopted by other teams.

• Partner with Product Management and Engineering leadership to transform validated internal patterns into product features that can be safely and reliably provided to customers.

• Ensure that designs comply with multi-tenant, regulatory, and data governance standards across GitLab.com and self-managed customers.

• Act as an escalation point for intricate technical and architectural choices relating to agentic workflows, AI safety, and large-scale systems integration.

• Mentor Principal and Staff Engineers engaged in AI and agentic initiatives, enhancing the overall quality of technical execution, experimentation rigor, and inter-team collaboration.

• Produce clear, opinionated design documents, architectural narratives, and decision records that assist teams in making aligned, high-quality decisions autonomously.

• Represent GitLab in the broader ecosystem at conferences, standards organizations, and open-source communities on subjects such as AI-assisted development, autonomous agents, and productivity measurement.

• Collaborate with Security and Compliance to establish guardrails, review processes, and monitoring for agentic features, ensuring the responsible use of AI and safeguarding customer data.

• Work with Reliability and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to guarantee that agentic services are observable, debuggable, and resilient, and that failure modes degrade gracefully.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience, including more than 4 years in a Staff, Principal, or similar senior technical leadership position.

• Profound knowledge of AI and ML systems, including large language models, agentic frameworks, and the design of autonomous workflows at production scale.

• A proven history of leading hands-on technical experiments, which includes defining evaluation frameworks, conducting benchmarks, and translating insights into scalable architectural decisions.

• Strong foundation in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, focusing on service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability, and operational resilience.

• Experience in designing and implementing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices for production systems.

• Proven ability to foster cross-functional alignment among Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and Data/ML teams on complex and ambiguous technical challenges.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across various teams or divisions without direct authority.

• Capability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization, demonstrating excellent written and asynchronous communication skills.

• Familiarity with GitLab's DevSecOps platform, CI/CD principles, and the software development lifecycle is highly advantageous.

🏝️ 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

• Home Office Support