Staff Software Engineer, Security Factory: Static Analysis

GitLab; United States; Remote; USD 153,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits to support health, finances,

Flexible Paid Time Off

Equity Compensation & Employee Stock-P

Growth and Development Fund

Parental Leave

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for the Security Factory: Code Scanning team. You will shape the static analysis engine, model program representations, and lead AI-assisted tooling efforts to find and fix security issues in code.

As a Staff engineer, you’ll define long-range goals, mentor engineers, and collaborate across security and development teams. This is a remote, global role emphasizing architecture, evaluation, and responsible disclosure in open source contexts.

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.
• 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, IRs, taint and data-flow analysis, etc.
• Deep application security experience, vulnerability research, CWE/OWASP knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Act as the directly responsible individual for the team’s highest-scope initiatives from design through delivery.
• Bring systems built by one engineer to team ownership through documentation, tests, and shared review.
• Set the technical direction for the AI-assisted tooling and establish checks for merge readiness, including SAST rules.
• Own the architecture of the program model and the pipeline turning source into findings, extend to new languages/frameworks.
• Solve high-scope technical problems, advocate for quality, security, and performance improvements with stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews and pairing, remove blockers to autonomy, define internal standards.
• Participate in on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations and urgent issues.
• Define overarching architecture and specifications for the engine, coordinating AI agents and engineers.
• Build and maintain harnesses, agent instructions, and governance to keep agent-written code trustworthy.
• Stay current with research in program analysis and security, turning findings into prototypes and upstream contributions.

Skills

LLM tooling

Rust

Go

Performance optimization

CI/CD

Containerization

Static analysis

Security (OWASP/CWE)

Mentoring

Tools

Docker

Job description

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 values and 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 Staff Backend Engineer on GitLab's Security Factory: Code Scanning team, you help developers find and fix security issues. Those issues live in the code they write, and you set the technical direction for the static analysis engine that finds them.

Your work spans two complementary parts of a complete security analysis. On the engine side, you shape how the static analysis toolkit models a program: parsing source into intermediate representations, resolving symbols, building call graphs, and tracking tainted data across files and languages. You define the architecture and specifications the team builds against, and you delegate component specifications within them to engineers and to the AI agents that implement them. On the evaluation side, you build and apply tooling that tests, measures, and validates what the engine finds against benchmark applications with known vulnerabilities.

What the engine can model and how we measure what it finds are parts of one picture. As a Staff engineer you hold that picture, shape the long‑range technical goals of the team, and raise the bar for every engineer on it. We build the engine with AI agents that write and review code from written specifications, under human direction. We expect you to direct that work effectively and with good judgment, and to help the team do the same.

What You Do

• 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

What You Bring

• Experience building your own LLM tooling, such as a harness, an agent pipeline, or evaluations, with the judgment to know when output is trustworthy and when it isn't
• Extensive professional experience writing, testing, and reviewing production code in Rust, Go, or a comparable systems language, with depth in at least one. The engine is Rust, the analyzer wrapper is Go, and the monolith integration is Ruby, and we value willingness to work across them.
• 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

Helpful Experience

• 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

About The Team

The Security Factory: Code Scanning team develops GitLab's SAST capabilities for customer software repositories.

We work closely with the Code Security team on scanning rules & flows, with Composition Analysis on the broader software supply chain, and with other groups across the Sec Section. We rely heavily on asynchronous work across time zones.

Remote-Global

United States Salary Range

$152,800—$259,200 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.

Privacy Policy:

Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.

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.