Principal Engineer, AI Agent Platform (Remote)

GitLab Inc.; Poland (ME); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Principal Engineer to help build the Duo Agent Platform, an orchestration layer for AI agents across the software lifecycle. You will set technical direction and work across teams to deliver reliable, scalable, and governable capabilities in a multi-tenant environment.

This fully remote role reports to the VP of AI Engineering. Candidates should have 8+ years in software engineering, senior leadership experience, and comfort with Ruby/Go/Python/TypeScript.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with leadership roles.
• Experience with large language models and agent-based systems.
• Strong distributed systems background.
• Experience mentoring engineers and shaping technical direction.
• Ability to operate across teams in a fully remote org.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction for a significant area of Duo Agent Platform across several teams, and partner with Engineering Managers and Product to turn it into a roadmap with a six-month horizon.
• Build the orchestration layer that makes agents and flows reliable: session lifecycle, tool invocation, context assembly, concurrency, retries, timeouts, and failure modes that degrade gracefully instead of stalling a developer's workflow.
• Hands on work on driving topics throughout the whole organisation from POC level, architecture to full implementation.
• Participate in Incident Management on-call rotation, to help meet availability goals for GitLab.com.
• Strong product builder and ownership mentality. Understanding of product strategy, technical strategy, delivering customer value and iteration towards a successful product
• Write clear, opinionated design documents, architecture narratives, and decision records that let other teams make aligned decisions. Ensure the architecture holds across multi-tenant GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments, including self-hosted model configurations, and respects data governance boundaries in each.
• Use the platform on our own work, find where it falls short of what we claim, and feed that back through improvements into the product.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Engineers, and raise the bar for experimentation rigor and cross-team collaboration.
• Work across the whole platform on different projects, features and teams. This reaches across:
• Design the extensibility surface so customers can build custom agents and flows, connect their own tools and internal systems, and bring external agents such as Claude Code and Codex into GitLab workflows without weakening the platform's guarantees.
• Drive down the cost and latency of agentic requests, and work with Product on how model selection, routing, and credit consumption behave as usage grows.
• Define the evaluation practice for the platform: offline benchmarks and online experiments that measure task completion, correctness, tool-call accuracy, latency, and cost per task, and that catch regressions before customers do.
• Build the governance and safety surface with Security and Compliance: policy-driven controls over which agents and models may run where, permission and identity semantics that align to existing roles and group structure, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, traceability of every flow session, and audit that stands up to enterprise review.
• Complete Interview Training and participate in hiring for the department as a technical interviewer or panel member.

Skills

8+ years software engineering

Staff/Principal leadership

LLM agent workflows

Distributed systems

Evaluation frameworks

Human-in-the-loop controls

Mentoring engineers

Ruby/Go/Python/TypeScript

Remote collaboration

Strong written communication

Tools

Ruby

Go

Python

TypeScript

Job description

GitLab is seeking a Principal Engineer to help build the Duo Agent Platform, an orchestration layer for AI agents across the software lifecycle. You will set technical direction and work across teams to deliver reliable, scalable, and governable capabilities in a multi-tenant environment.

This fully remote role reports to the VP of AI Engineering. Candidates should have 8+ years in software engineering, senior leadership experience, and comfort with Ruby/Go/Python/TypeScript.