GitLab
Forward Deployed Engineer, AI and Agentic SDLC
About this role
GitLab seeks a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer to design and build agentic AI systems at the frontier of software development. You'll partner directly with strategic customers and GitLab teams to develop agent workflows, context systems, and platform capabilities while diagnosing failures and optimizing AI system behavior across models, retrieval, and developer experiences.
What you'll do
- Design and build agentic systems using models, tools, orchestration, context retrieval, evaluation, and human oversight
- Develop context and knowledge systems using RAG, cache augmentation, graph-based retrieval, and repository understanding
- Work embedded in strategic customer environments to identify technical friction and translate needs into working solutions
- Build agent workflows, integrations, evaluation suites, and reference architectures that improve customer outcomes
- Contribute production-quality changes across GitLab Duo Agent Platform and evaluate system quality, reliability, latency, cost, and safety
- Provide Staff-level technical leadership through architecture, implementation, review, and mentorship across teams
What they're looking for
- Staff-level software engineering with experience building and shipping complex production systems
- Hands-on AI system design, debugging, tracing, and optimization
- Agent systems architecture including models, context, retrieval, tools, state, and control flow
- Programming proficiency in Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, or C#
- AI safety, authorization, governance, observability, and cost management
- Ability to learn and contribute across large polyglot codebases
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills
- Understanding of why AI systems fail to adopt or consume resources inefficiently
Opens the application — the Jobs AI extension fills it for you. Set up autofill
Opens the official application on the employer’s site. No login required.
GitLab
GitLab builds development platforms and internal AI-powered solutions to optimize business operations. The company is hiring for cloud infrastructure and AI engineering roles focused on cost optimization, financial systems, and AI-driven workflow improvements across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support.
- Website
- gitlab.com
Likely interview questions
- Describe a complex AI system you've built—what made it succeed or fail, and how did you debug and optimize it?
- How would you approach designing context and retrieval systems for an agentic code development platform?