Staff Backend Engineer — AI-Driven SAST (Remote)

GitLab; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 115,000 - 196,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Flexible PTO

Equity & ESPP

Growth & Development Fund

Parental Leave

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer on the Security Factory: Code Scanning team to shape the static analysis engine and define architecture for parsing, IRs, call graphs, and taint tracking. You will set direction and collaborate with AI agents and engineers to drive secure software analysis.

You will mentor engineers, own high‑scope initiatives from design through delivery, and align with product partners to improve quality, security, and performance across the tooling stack.

Qualifications

• Experience building your own LLM tooling, such as a harness, an agent pipeline, or evaluations.
• Extensive professional experience writing, testing, and reviewing production code in Rust, Go, or a comparable systems language, with depth in at least one.
• Experience with performance optimization and with containerized workflows and CI/CD (we use Docker heavily).
• A deep program analysis and static analysis background, such as parsing and ASTs, intermediate representations (SSA, control-flow and call graphs), taint and data-flow analysis, type inference, incremental and fixpoint computation, or writing detection rules, with the ability to read, evaluate, and apply the research literature
• Deep application security experience, such as vulnerability research, secure code review, or writing detection rules, and fluency with vulnerability classes (OWASP Top 10, CWE)
• Demonstrated capacity to communicate clearly and concisely about complex technical, architectural, and organizational problems, and to write architecture and design specifications that bring a team to a decision
• A track record of taking ownership of ambiguous, team-wide problems and shipping them from concept to production with minimal guidance, with specific, regular async updates on progress, blockers, risks, and next steps
• Experience defining a system's overarching architecture, delegating component specifications to engineers and AI agents, and getting them implemented reliably
• A track record of mentoring engineers, raising a team's technical bar, and influencing technical direction by achieving consensus with peers and leadership
• Familiarity with popular web or mobile application frameworks and how they handle input, data, and configuration
• Experience designing guardrails for agent-written code, such as mutation testing, fuzzing, and CI gates the coding agent cannot modify
• A record of engaging with the research community, such as publications, tool papers, or upstream open source contributions in program analysis or security

Responsibilities

• Act as the directly responsible individual (DRI) for the team's highest-scope initiatives from design through delivery, shipping large features with minimal guidance and shaping the long-range goals of the team
• Bring systems built by one engineer to team ownership through documentation, tests, and shared review
• Set the technical direction for the AI-assisted tooling that implements, reviews, and validates engine changes and findings, design the checks that decide whether an agent-written change or generated result is fit to merge, and measure detection quality against benchmark applications with known vulnerabilities, raising the bar for what counts as a trustworthy result. That includes static application security testing (SAST) rules mapped to CWE and OWASP, and the test fixtures that prove they work.
• Own the architecture of the program model (parsing, symbol resolution, intermediate representations, call graphs, and taint and data-flow analysis) and of the pipeline that turns source code into findings, and define how both extend to new languages and frameworks
• Solve technical problems of the highest scope and complexity, actively seek out difficult impediments affecting the whole team, and advocate for improvements to quality, security, and performance with Product Management, UX, and partner teams such as Code Security and Composition Analysis
• Mentor all engineers on the team through code review and pairing, remove blockers to their autonomy, and shepherd the definition and improvement of our internal standards through review
• Participate in on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues
• Define the overarching architecture and specification documents for the engine, delegate component specifications within them, and drive their implementation by AI agents and engineers working independently through phased plans, small reviewable units of change, and specifications kept in lockstep with the code
• Build and maintain the harness, agent instructions, and agentic skills that keep agent-written code trustworthy, including separate coding and reviewing agents, rules and tests the coding agents cannot change, independent review panels of agents from different model providers, and performance, API, and dependency gates, with risky changes escalated to human review
• Stay current with research in program analysis and security, run AI-assisted research and spikes, and turn the findings into prototypes, proposals, and upstream contributions, including responsible disclosure of findings in open source projects

Skills

LLM tooling

Rust

Go

Ruby

Static analysis

Data-flow analysis

Vulnerability research

Code review

Mentoring

Async updates

Tools

Docker

CI/CD

AI agents

Job description

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer on the Security Factory: Code Scanning team to shape the static analysis engine and define architecture for parsing, IRs, call graphs, and taint tracking. You will set direction and collaborate with AI agents and engineers to drive secure software analysis.

You will mentor engineers, own high‑scope initiatives from design through delivery, and align with product partners to improve quality, security, and performance across the tooling stack.