Forward Deployed Engineer, AI and Agentic SDLC

Overview

Staff Forward Deployed Engineer focused on AI and agentic SDLC, helping define and build GitLab Duo Agent Platform and working with strategic customers to resolve friction and improve outcomes.

What you'll do

• Design and build agentic systems using models, tools, action loops, orchestration, and context.
• Develop context and knowledge systems including retrieval-augmented and cache-augmented generation, graph-based retrieval, and context optimization.
• Work directly in strategic customer environments to understand technical friction and turn ambiguous needs into solutions.
• Build agent workflows, integrations, evaluation suites, reference architectures, and product capabilities.
• Contribute production-quality changes across GitLab Duo Agent Platform and broader GitLab product.
• Evaluate and improve AI system quality, reliability, latency, cost, safety, authorization, governance, and developer experience.
• Diagnose failures across models, context, retrieval, tool use, control flow, product behavior, and permissions.

What you'll need

• Staff-level software-engineering experience building, shipping, and improving complex production systems.
• Hands-on experience designing and building substantive AI systems with evaluation, tracing, debugging, and optimization.
• Strong understanding of agentic systems including models, context, retrieval, tools, state, control flow, evaluation, and human oversight.
• Strong programming skills in one or more listed languages: Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, C#, or another language used for AI/backend/developer-platform systems.
• Practical understanding of AI safety, authorization, governance, observability, and cost management.
• Ability to communicate clearly with customers and senior stakeholders while staying deeply technical.

Details

• Location: remote, United States.
• Work engagements may range from focused technical consultation to long-running design partnership.