Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

What you’ll do

• Conduct deep technical discovery in selected strategic accounts to assess platform readiness, understand constraints, and identify the highest-leverage adoption opportunities across GitLab and DAP.
• Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where DAP, platform migration, regulated constraints, and core-product boundaries intersect.
• Partner with customer stakeholders and GitLab account teams to prioritize high-value use cases based on business impact, technical feasibility, and repeatability.
• Design and build bounded proofs, deployment patterns, reusable components, and accelerators across SCM, CI/CD, security, compliance, and DAP workflows.
• Build rapid proofs or prototypes to validate promising approaches before hardening them into reusable assets, reference architectures, or upstream contributions.
• Design for reuse from the start so that each engagement leaves behind a durable asset such as a runbook, template, reference architecture, code component, design note, or product brief.
• Author reference architectures, deployment standards, and reusable accelerators that materially reduce time to value across multiple customer environments.
• Build hybrid tooling that lives between a product feature and a customer deliverable, especially in self-managed, regulated, or migration-heavy environments.
• Prototype, validate, and harden DAP workflows using custom agents, custom flows, GitLab APIs, MCP integrations, CI/CD automation, and policy-aware deployment patterns.
• Architect self-managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, AI Gateway, model connectivity, observability, and governance controls.
• Translate recurring field patterns into reusable technical guidance, reference assets, product briefs, and design notes for Customer Success, Professional Services, Solution Architecture, Product, and Engineering.
• Contribute production-ready code, design docs, or architecture changes when strategically necessary, with clear Engineering review and handoff.
• Raise the architectural bar through strong technical judgment, reuse discipline, and a clear bias against account-specific one-off solutions.
• Measure success through adoption lift, DAP usage, new lifecycle-stage activation, reusable asset creation, blocker removal, and upstream impact — not through quota or case-study production.
• Lead structured technical discovery in complex enterprise environments, mapping workflows, constraints, and organizational dynamics to identify the highest-leverage adoption opportunities across GitLab and DAP.
• Partner with senior technical and business stakeholders to define phased adoption strategies, success criteria, and architecture decisions aligned to business goals.
• Navigate complex stakeholder environments across security, compliance, platform engineering, and business teams to drive alignment and remove blockers.
• Recommend and prioritize adoption paths and use case portfolios based on business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability, and long-term platform value.

What you’ll bring

• Seven or more years of experience across software engineering, platform architecture, forward-deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-adjacent engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with production experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Go; ability to read, reason about, and contribute to a large production codebase.
• Strong systems-design and software-architecture skills, including the ability to reason about APIs, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD systems, security boundaries, scalability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Demonstrated experience architecting enterprise-scale systems that balance security, reliability, operational simplicity, and adoption needs.
• Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline architecture, YAML, runners, GitLab APIs, and the broader DevSecOps workflow.
• Deep curiosity about how GitLab is built, including comfort navigating platform boundaries and determining when a problem belongs in configuration, a shared accelerator, or core product.
• Track record of creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, such as frameworks, accelerators, tools, standards, or design guidance.
• Experience contributing to shared platforms, internal developer tooling, or core product capabilities in collaboration with engineering teams.
• Experience leading architecture conversations with senior technical stakeholders and navigating security, compliance, platform, and business tradeoffs.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling, such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or equivalent approaches.
• Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, tool orchestration, and the practical limitations of AI systems in production environments.
• Strong preference for experience with self-managed GitLab, regulated deployment models, and familiarity with GitLab internals and contribution workflows.
• Strong written communication, including the ability to author technical design documents, architecture guidance, and concise product briefs that Engineering and Product can act on.
• Customer-facing experience in complex enterprise environments with the ability to navigate ambiguity without defaulting to custom one-off delivery.
• Experience leading technical discovery and architecture conversations with senior stakeholders, including directors, VPs, and cross-functional technical leaders.
• Proven ability to translate ambiguous business challenges into concrete technical direction, architectural decisions, and reusable solutions.
• Experience navigating complex organizational dynamics and building alignment across security, compliance, engineering, and business stakeholders.
• Track record of influencing product direction through field insight, technical design, reusable assets, or upstream contributions.

Requirements

Required qualifications

• Seven or more years of experience across software engineering, platform architecture, forward-deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-adjacent engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the ability to read, reason about, and contribute to production systems.…