Senior Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity

GitLab Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 139,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Paid Time Off

Equity Compensation

Parental Leave

Growth and Development Fund

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer on the Nonlinear Productivity team. You will diagnose and remove friction in the software development lifecycle using AI-powered automation, building reliable, safety-checked systems and agentic workflows.

You’ll evaluate outputs and ensure correctness and cost-efficiency across distributed deployments. You will work across GitLab's codebase and collaborate with the India-based group, shaping a greenfield space into a scalable, customer-facing

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building agentic or large language model-based systems, multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery patterns.
• Track record of working autonomously in unfamiliar codebases, delivering solutions through to completion.
• Strong distributed systems knowledge: coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python and ability to read/modify other languages.
• Experience shipping autonomous agents that complete real tasks end to end and working with globally distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Identify sources of friction across GitLab's software development lifecycle and scope agentic solutions.
• Design and build reliable AI-powered systems that follow step-by-step workflows with safety checks.
• Build and maintain evaluation tools that judge agent output for correctness, constraints, and cost.
• Work across GitLab's codebase to address friction wherever it exists.
• Apply distributed systems judgment to identify failures under concurrency and scale.
• Collaborate with the India-based group on roadmaps, findings, and reusable tooling.
• Take ownership of a greenfield problem space from day one and shape it into a customer-facing capability.

Skills

Agentic AI systems

Go

Rust

Python

Job description

Location: Canada; United States

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our valuesand continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

*Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on GitLab's Nonlinear Productivity team, you'll find and remove friction across the software development lifecycle using reliable AI-powered automation — diagnosing problems like long review cycles, manual release steps, and brittle automation, then building the automation and process changes that resolve them for good.

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

• Identify sources of friction across GitLab's software development lifecycle and scope agentic solutions to address them, turning vague pain points into concrete, buildable proposals.
• Design and build reliable AI-powered systems that follow step‑by‑step workflows, use tools and safety checks, and correct errors before taking engineering action — the kind of output you can actually trust with real engineering decisions.
• Build and maintain evaluation tools that judge agent output on correctness, constraint compliance, and cost, not on whether it merely "seems to work."
• Work across GitLab's codebase as each problem requires, going wherever the friction actually is rather than staying inside one service or product area.
• Apply distributed systems judgment to identify generated code that may fail under concurrency, at scale, or across self‑managed, dedicated, and multi‑tenant deployments, catching failures before they reach customers.
• Collaborate with the India-based group, sharing roadmaps, findings, and reusable agent tooling
• Take ownership of a greenfield problem space from day one, helping shape a proven internal fix into a capability GitLab could offer customers externally, with your scope and impact free to grow as the team scales.

What you’ll bring

• Hands‑on experience building agentic or large language model‑based systems — multi‑step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery patterns — and making them reliable in production, not treated as one‑off prompts or demonstrations.
• A track record of working autonomously in unfamiliar codebases, getting oriented quickly, and driving solutions through completion.
• Strong distributed systems knowledge, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes, and degradation under load.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, in that order of team priority, and the ability to read and modify code in the other languages.
• Helpful experience includes shipping autonomous agents that complete real tasks from start to finish; improving build systems, release processes, review workflows, or other parts of the software development lifecycle; and working with globally distributed teams, large language model workload costs, or production constraints across on‑premises, air‑gapped, single‑tenant, and software‑as‑a‑service deployments.

About the team

Nonlinear Productivity — shortened internally to "NLP," with no relation to natural language processing — is one of GitLab's newest teams: a strategic incubation group that reports into AI Platform leadership under the direct sponsorship of the CTO. It's split into a US group (this role) and an India-based group working the same charter; the two sync on roadmap and tooling a few times a week but otherwise run day to day on their own. It operates like a startup — no dedicated product manager, no pre-set backlog — and solutions that prove out internally are the team's path to a monetized, customer-facing GitLab offering.

It's a good fit for engineers who'd rather go find the next problem than be handed one, and who want a hand in defining a brand‑new part of GitLab from its first commit.

Remote-Global

*The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of theUnited States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US.Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data,and geographic location.The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range

$139,200—$235,200 USD

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.

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GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.