Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

An Overview of This Role

GitLab’s Forward Deployed Engineering team is a field-situated product engineering function focused on strategic customer outcomes, AI adoption, and direct contribution back to GitLab’s product. This is not a traditional field engineering, solutions architecture, or professional services role. The Staff Forward Deployed Engineer is expected to operate with deep customer proximity while maintaining the technical bar and contribution discipline of a Staff-level product engineer.

This role exists where strategic customer urgency, complex technical ambiguity, and GitLab product execution intersect. The Staff FDE will work directly with strategic customers, Product, Engineering, Support, SRE, SA, CSA, CSM, and Professional Services to diagnose and resolve high-impact adoption blockers, contribute production-grade fixes and features, and convert learning into repeatable patterns for GitLab and its customers.

The ideal candidate is a Staff-level product or platform engineer with strong Ruby/Rails, Go, systems, DevSecOps, and AI adoption experience who can operate credibly in front of senior customer stakeholders while also contributing directly to GitLab’s core product.

Why This Role Exists

Strategic customers sometimes encounter challenges that are too broad, deep, urgent, or cross-functional for any single existing team to own end-to-end. These challenges may involve product gaps, performance degradation, scale bottlenecks, AI governance, adoption blockers, architectural constraints, Git usage patterns, CI/CD complexity, API automation, security requirements, or operational instability.

FDE provides technical stewardship in these moments. The team does not simply observe, report, or escalate. FDE engages directly, diagnoses the real technical problem, collaborates with the right internal teams, contributes code or technical solutions where appropriate, and transitions the outcome back into normal ownership once the customer is stabilized and the learning is reusable.

Core Responsibilities

Product Contribution

• Contribute production-quality code to GitLab’s product and adjacent systems.
• Develop bug fixes, features, integrations, tooling, or performance improvements where strategic customer outcomes require direct engineering contribution.