Staff Backend Engineer, Agentic Systems Lead

GitLab; United States; Remote; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Staff Engineer to serve as the technical anchor for its Nonlinear Productivity team in the US. You will define the direction for agentic systems, shape how agents interact with humans, and ensure robust solutions through hands-on leadership across the codebase.

You will mentor senior and mid-level engineers, prioritize friction sources in the SDLC, and drive distributed systems excellence across a generalist, cross-functional group.

Responsibilities

• 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 pairin

Job description

GitLab is seeking a Staff Engineer to serve as the technical anchor for its Nonlinear Productivity team in the US. You will define the direction for agentic systems, shape how agents interact with humans, and ensure robust solutions through hands-on leadership across the codebase.

You will mentor senior and mid-level engineers, prioritize friction sources in the SDLC, and drive distributed systems excellence across a generalist, cross-functional group.