Staff Systems Engineer, IT
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The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.
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An Overview of This Role
Staff Systems Engineer, IT is a senior, hands-on engineering role for a generalist who is comfortable owning a broad set of platforms. You'll own the systems and integrations behind the employee lifecycle, onboarding, role changes, and offboarding, and you'll build them the way we build software: as infrastructure-as-code, with SRE practices behind them so they are versioned, observable, and reliable. You'll be the technical owner of GitLab's ITSM platform and the AI capabilities layered on top of it, designing virtual agents, agentic workflows, and knowledge experiences that resolve requests before they ever become tickets. You'll also own shared IT infrastructure across our cloud footprint. Working with our AI-enabled ITSM, you'll replace repetitive manual work with durable automation, and you'll partner with End User Services, Security, People, and Finance to scale those solutions company-wide. You'll be measured on automation coverage of lifecycle processes, AI deflection rates, and the reliability of the systems you build.
What You'll Do
- Design, build, and own end-to-end automation for the employee lifecycle - onboarding, transfers, role changes, and offboarding - so provisioning and deprovisioning happen accurately and with minimal human touch.
- Serve as the technical owner of GitLab's ITSM platform, including service catalog design, workflow, request/incident/change processes, integrations, and platform upgrades.
- Increase AI deflection rates for all stakeholders of the ITSM system by deploying and tuning virtual agents, AI search, and agentic resolution, and by measuring what actually resolves requests without human intervention.
- Identify repetitive, manual workflows across IT and its partner teams and replace them with automation built in our ITSM and Serval.
- Build and maintain integrations between the ITSM platform and GitLab's core systems, including Okta, Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, JAMF, Fleet, Workday, and GitLab itself.
- Manage IT-owned infrastructure as code across our cloud environments, so every change ships through version control, code review, and an automated, auditable path to production.
- Apply SRE principles to the services IT owns: meaningful monitoring and alerting, clear reliability targets, capacity and cost awareness, and blameless post-incident review.
- Develop the knowledge management and self-service experiences that feed AI deflection: well-structured articles, catalog items, and conversational flows that stay accurate as systems change.
- Instrument automation and AI performance with clear metrics and dashboards, deflection rate, time to resolution, automation coverage, and failure rates, and iterate publicly on the results.
- Set engineering standards for the IT automation stack, including version control, testing, code review, environment management, and change control, and mentor support engineers across the IT organization.
- Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure lifecycle automation and AI workflows meet access, audit, and control requirements, including SOX and SOC 2.
- Document architecture, runbooks, and design decisions in the handbook so the systems you build are transparent, maintainable, and operable by the whole team.
What You'll Bring
- Breadth as a generalist systems engineer. You have owned a wide range of platforms end to end, and you pick up unfamiliar ones fast enough to own them outright.
- Solid infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform or similar), with change managed through version control, code review, and automated deployment rather than manual, one-off work.
- A working command of SRE principles, including observability, monitoring and alerting, reliability targets, and blameless post-incident review, applied to the services you own.
- Experience running workloads in a major public cloud; working knowledge across all three (AWS, GCP, and Azure) is a plus.
- Experience designing or operating virtual desktop infrastructure (Azure Virtual Desktop, Amazon WorkSpaces, Citrix, or similar).
- A track record automating employee lifecycle processes across HRIS, identity, and endpoint management systems for a distributed or remote workforce.
- Experience with workflow automation and iPaaS tooling (Okta Workflows, Serval, or similar) and with an ITSM platform; experience with a major ITSM platform is a plus.
- Familiarity with AI-enabled service capabilities such as virtual agents, AI search, and agentic resolution, and an interest in using them to resolve requests without human intervention.
- Strong scripting and development skills (Python, JavaScript, or similar), with fluency in REST APIs, webhooks, and event-driven integration patterns.
- Experience defining and reporting on operational metrics, with the judgment to know which automation opportunities are worth the investment and which are not.
- Excellent written communication skills suited to an all-remote, async-first company, and the ability to influence stakeholders well outside your reporting line.
About the Team
IT Engineering builds the systems and automation that make an all-remote company run. We own the platforms behind identity, endpoints, the employee lifecycle, and IT service management, and we treat them like products: versioned, tested, measured, and iterated in the open. We operate the way GitLab builds software - all-remote, async-first, transparent by default, and biased toward automating anything we would otherwise have to do twice. We invest heavily in AI so Team Members get answers instantly and our engineers can spend their energy on higher-leverage work. IT Engineering partners closely with End User Services, Security, Workplace, People, and Finance to make GitLab a place where the tools just work.
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
$126,000—$213,600 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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