Specialty
The role
GitLab is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer for Nonlinear Productivity, a new incubation team under AI Platform leadership. The US-based group builds agentic systems that cut friction in GitLab's own software development lifecycle. The team has no product manager, so you shape what gets built.
What you will do
- Set technical direction for the team's agentic systems, including how agents are orchestrated and which steps stay with humans
- Find and prioritize friction in GitLab's development lifecycle and drive fixes through to measured results
- Work across any part of the GitLab codebase as problems require
- Catch generated code that breaks under concurrency, scale or different deployment types, and coach others to do so
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews and pairing
- Sync with the India-based group a few times a week and report progress to the CTO's organization; lead the Technical Leadership interview round for Staff candidates
What they ask for
- Experience building reliable agentic or LLM-based systems with orchestration, tool use, guardrails and recovery
- Able to work autonomously in unfamiliar codebases from discovery to completion
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes
- Proficiency in Go, Rust or Python, and able to read the others
- Track record turning unclear requirements into small, shippable steps
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks where plausible and correct differ
- History of unblocking teammates through reviews, writing or mentoring
This is our own short reading of the posting. The full description, and anything that has changed since, is on GitLab's careers page behind the apply button.
