Staff Forward Deployed Engineer – AI SDLC (EMEA)

GitLab; Germany (OH); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer for the EMEA pipeline, focusing on AI-enabled SDLC and strategic customer outcomes. You will work directly with customers while maintaining the product engineering standards for GitLab, delivering durable improvements, and guiding adoption of the agentic platform across teams.

The role emphasizes cross-functional collaboration, technical leadership, and the creation of reusable guidance and architecture patterns to scale impact beyond

Qualifications

• Staff-level experience building, operating, or improving complex production software systems.
• Experience contributing to large, mature product codebases with high standards for testing, maintainability, performance, and security.
• Strong Ruby on Rails or Go experience and the ability to contribute directly to GitLab’s product and adjacent systems.
• Experience with AI-assisted software development, agentic workflows, AI governance, model evaluation, context management, prompt and workflow design, or AI adoption in enterprise environments.
• Experience diagnosing complex system behavior across application code, data stores, infrastructure, observability, networking, APIs, and customer usage patterns.
• Deep knowledge of modern DevSecOps workflows, including Git, merge requests, CI/CD, security controls, compliance needs, and enterprise software delivery.
• Experience working with strategic customers or senior technical stakeholders in ambiguous, high-impact situations.
• The ability to coordinate across product, engineering, field, and customer teams without formal authority.
• Strong written communication and sound judgment, including the ability to create technical narratives and distinguish reusable product work from customer-specific customization.

Responsibilities

• Contribute production-quality code to GitLab’s product and adjacent systems.
• Develop bug fixes, features, integrations, tooling, and performance improvements when strategic customer outcomes require direct engineering work.
• Work within GitLab’s product and engineering processes, including issue discovery, merge request creation, testing, review, documentation, and maintainability.
• Partner with Product and Engineering so customer-driven solutions support long-term product direction rather than becoming one-off customizations.
• Turn blockers discovered in the field into durable product improvements, reference architectures, documentation, and repeatable implementation patterns.
• Engage with strategically important customers when adoption, retention, executive confidence, or public trust is materially at risk.
• Diagnose complex problems across GitLab product behavior, customer architecture, Git internals, CI/CD workflows, API usage, observability, infrastructure, networking, and cloud environments.
• Coordinate across Product, Engineering, SRE, Support, SA, CSA, CSM, Professional Services, and customer technical teams to drive resolution from discovery through handoff.
• Provide recommendations grounded in data, traces, and systems analysis to improve GitLab usage, workflows, automation, and architecture.
• Create durable outcomes without establishing permanent dependency on Forward Deployed Engineering.
• Drive governed, measurable, and production-oriented adoption of GitLab Duo Agent Platform with strategic customers.
• Identify and resolve AI adoption blockers involving governance, usage controls, auditability, security, compliance, operating models, workflow design, and integrations.
• Develop customer-safe adoption patterns for the agentic software development lifecycle (SDLC), AI-assisted development, intent-based review, AI governance, and human-in-the-loop software delivery.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Field, and Customer Success teams to turn AI adoption learning into reusable guidance and product improvements.
• Create technical narratives grounded in customer experience and product reality that can help shape the industry’s approach.
• Contribute to Well-Architected Frameworks, whitepapers, webinars, reference architectures, technical strategy memos, and adoption frameworks.
• Guide ideas through discovery, formulation, validation, amplification, and adoption across GitLab.
• Partner with SA, CSA, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Product Marketing Management, CSM, Support, and executive stakeholders to make technical thought leadership a shared company capability.

Skills

Ruby on Rails

Go

AI governance

CI/CD

Git

Kubernetes

Docker

Linux

Observability

Technical leadership

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

Sidekiq

Vue

TypeScript

Kubernetes

Docker

Linux

Observability tools

Job description

GitLab is seeking a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer for the EMEA pipeline, focusing on AI-enabled SDLC and strategic customer outcomes. You will work directly with customers while maintaining the product engineering standards for GitLab, delivering durable improvements, and guiding adoption of the agentic platform across teams.

The role emphasizes cross-functional collaboration, technical leadership, and the creation of reusable guidance and architecture patterns to scale impact beyond