Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity

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.