Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity

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An overview of this role

As a Staff Engineer, you'll be the technical anchor for GitLab's Nonlinear Productivity team in the US: the person who decides what "proven" means before something ships, and who helps shape what the team builds next, not just how to build it. It's a from-scratch, generalist team with no dedicated product manager - that ownership starts on day one.

Some examples of the problems this team takes on:

• Cutting the time it takes to complete a good code review - one that still keeps a human in the loop - by half, using agentic solutions.
• Turning a manual, error-prone release step into an agentic workflow that catches its own mistakes before a human ever has to.

What you'll do

• Set the technical direction for the team's agentic systems, from how agents are orchestrated to where a step should stay human-owned, and defend those calls once they're tested against real code.
• Discover and prioritize sources of friction across GitLab's SDLC, driving the fix - agentic, process-based, or both - from a rough hypothesis through to a shipped, measured result.
• Work across any part of GitLab's codebase as the problem requires, since this team operates like a small, generalist group rather than one scoped to a single service.
• Apply distributed systems judgment to catch cases where generated code looks correct but breaks under concurrency, at scale, or across deployment topologies (including self-managed, dedicated, and multi-tenant environments), and coach others to do the same.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on agent engineering practices and distributed systems judgment, through design reviews and pairing that raise the team's collective bar rather than just your own output.
• Collaborate with the India-based group a few times a week to align on the roadmap, and represent the team's technical progress to stakeholders in the Chief Technology Officer's organization.
• Serve as a bar raiser for the team's hiring, owning the Technical Leadership round for other Staff-level candidates as the team scales.
• Own a greenfield technical foundation from day one, with your scope and impact free to grow as the team scales.

What you'll bring

• Experience building reliable agentic or large language model (LLM)-based systems, including multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery.
• Ability to work autonomously in unfamiliar codebases and drive solutions from discovery through completion.
• Strong distributed systems and computer science fundamentals, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes, and degradation under load.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, with the ability to read and modify code in the others.
• A track record of delivering results from unclear or incomplete requirements - able to take a complex, loosely specified problem and decompose it into a concrete proposal of small, shippable steps.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for systems where "looks plausible" and "is actually correct" are different questions, and a track record of raising the quality bar for a team's output, not just your own.
• A history of unblocking and enabling teammates - through design reviews, technical writing, or mentoring - and of engaging regularly with other teams to find where collaboration actually pays off.

About the team

Nonlinear Productivity - shortened internally to "NLP," with no relation to natural language processing - is one of GitLab's newest teams: a strategic incubation group that reports into AI Platform leadership under the direct sponsorship of the CTO. It's split into a US group (this role) and an India-based group working the same charter; the two sync on roadmap and tooling a few times a week but otherwise run day to day on their own. Solutions that prove out internally are the team's path to a monetized, customer-facing GitLab offering.

It's a good fit for engineers who want technical ownership of something with no existing playbook, and a hand in defining a brand-new part of GitLab from its first commit.

Remote-Global

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range

$152,800—$259,200 USD

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off 
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave  

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.  

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