Distinguished Engineer, Agentic SDLC & Non‑Linear Productivity

The role

Distinguished Engineer role pioneering and scaling agentic SDLC capabilities across GitLab's platform and internal workflows. This senior technical leadership position bridges Architecture, Product, Infrastructure, and Data/ML teams to identify, validate, and productize autonomous workflow solutions. Reports to a Director-level engineering leader.

What you'd do

• Define and refine company-wide technical vision for autonomous agents in software development aligned with product strategy
• Identify and prioritize transformational productivity opportunities across planning, coding, review, security, compliance, and operations phases
• Lead hands-on experimentation and prototyping to validate where agents can own or reshape engineering tasks like code authoring and test generation
• Design reference architectures for agentic systems including orchestration, safety controls, observability, and human oversight mechanisms
• Create evaluation frameworks measuring correctness, latency, safety, cost, and productivity impact through offline and online experiments
• Own pathfinder use cases driving adoption and demonstrating measurable productivity gains across engineering teams
• Define and track core metrics like cycle time, MTTR, and throughput linked to agent interventions and business outcomes
• Capture reusable patterns and playbooks enabling other teams to adopt agentic workflows with minimal friction
• Convert proven internal patterns into product capabilities for customers while respecting multi-tenant and compliance requirements
• Escalate complex technical decisions on agent workflows, AI safety, and large-scale system integration
• Mentor Principal and Staff Engineers on AI and agentic initiatives, raising execution and collaboration standards
• Author design documents and decision records enabling independent, aligned team decision-making
• Represent GitLab at conferences and standards groups on AI-assisted development and productivity measurement
• Partner with Security and Compliance to establish guardrails and monitoring for agentic features

What they're looking for

• Minimum 10 years software engineering experience including 4+ years in Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leadership
• Deep expertise in AI/ML systems including large language models, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflows at production scale
• Proven track record leading hands-on technical experimentation with evaluation frameworks and benchmark-to-architecture translation
• Strong background in scalable multi-tenant distributed systems covering service decomposition, fault tolerance, and operational resilience
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices for production systems
• Demonstrated ability driving cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and Data/ML on complex challenges
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority
• Ability to work effectively in fully remote, globally distributed environment with strong written and asynchronous communication

Nice to have

• Familiarity with GitLab's DevSecOps platform and CI/CD primitives
• Background in software development lifecycle optimization