Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, EMEA

Overview

Staff Forward Deployed Engineer on GitLab's Forward Deployed Engineering team, a field-situated product engineering function focused on strategic customer outcomes, AI adoption, and direct contributions to GitLab's product.

What you'll do

• Contribute production-quality code to GitLab's product and adjacent systems, including bug fixes, features, integrations, tooling, and performance improvements when strategic customer outcomes require direct engineering work.
• Work within GitLab's product and engineering processes, including issue discovery, merge request creation, testing, review, documentation, and maintainability.
• Partner with Product and Engineering so customer-driven solutions support long-term product direction.
• Turn blockers discovered in the field into durable product improvements, reference architectures, documentation, and repeatable implementation patterns.
• Engage with strategically important customers when adoption, retention, executive confidence, or public trust is materially at risk.
• Diagnose complex problems across GitLab product behavior, customer architecture, Git internals, CI/CD workflows, API usage, observability, infrastructure, networking, and cloud environments.
• Coordinate across Product, Engineering, SRE, Support, SA, CSA, CSM, Professional Services, and customer technical teams to drive resolution from discovery through handoff.
• Provide recommendations grounded in data, traces, and systems analysis to improve GitLab usage, workflows, automation, and architecture.
• Create durable outcomes without establishing permanent dependency on Forward Deployed Engineering.
• Drive governed, measurable, and production-oriented adoption of GitLab Duo Agent Platform with strategic customers.
• Identify and resolve AI adoption blockers involving governance, usage controls, auditability, security, compliance, operating models, workflow design, and integrations.
• Develop customer-safe adoption patterns for the agentic software development lifecycle (SDLC), AI-assisted development, intent-based review, AI governance, and human-in-the-loop software delivery.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Field, and Customer Success teams to turn AI adoption learning into reusable guidance and product improvements.
• Create technical narratives grounded in customer experience and product reality.
• Contribute to Well-Architected Frameworks, whitepapers, webinars, reference architectures, technical strategy memos, and adoption frameworks.
• Guide ideas through discovery, formulation, validation, amplification, and adoption across GitLab.

What you'll need

• Staff-level experience building, operating, or improving complex production software systems.
• Experience contributing to large, mature product codebases with high standards for testing, maintainability, performance, and security.
• Strong Ruby on Rails or Go experience and the ability to contribute directly to GitLab's product and adjacent systems.
• Experience with AI-assisted software development, agentic workflows, AI governance, model evaluation, context management, prompt and workflow design, or AI adoption in enterprise environments.
• Experience diagnosing complex system behavior across application code, data stores, infrastructure, observability, networking, APIs, and customer usage patterns.
• Deep knowledge of modern DevSecOps workflows, including Git, merge requests, CI/CD, security controls, compliance needs, and enterprise software delivery.
• Experience working with strategic customers or senior technical stakeholders in ambiguous, high-impact situations.
• The ability to coordinate across product, engineering, field, and customer teams without formal authority.
• Strong written communication and sound judgment, including the ability to create technical narratives and distinguish reusable product work from customer-specific customization.

Nice to have

• Direct experience with GitLab as a platform, including GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, or GitLab Self-Managed.
• Production experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Vue, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, or observability tools.
• Deep familiarity with Git internals, repository performance, large-scale Git usage patterns, or GitLab Runner behavior.
• Experience creating technical thought-leadership materials, such as whitepapers, technical talks, architecture frameworks, requests for comments, public technical writing, or internal strategy documents.
• A background in performance engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems.
• Experience working in open source or highly asynchronous engineering environments.

Details

• Remote role; location eligibility in Ireland, Austria, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom.