Distinguished Engineer, Core DevOps

Overview

As a Distinguished Engineer, you will set and refine the technical direction for Core DevOps services that power GitLab’s users. You’ll translate company productivity and AI goals into concrete roadmaps, while ensuring reliability and scalability across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments. You drive architecture decisions, mentor engineers, and partner with Infra, Security, and SRE to keep systems observable and resilient. This role blends hands-on experimentation with strategic leadership to advance AI-native engineering at scale.

Pay / Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave
• Team Member Resource Groups

Responsibilities

• Define go-forward technical direction for CI, CD, Plan, and source code experiences aligned with architectural initiatives
• Collaborate with VP of Engineering on planning and technical investment for the group
• Translate company AI and productivity goals into actionable roadmaps for Core DevOps
• Define measurable targets for availability, latency at p95/p99, pipeline success, test reliability, data correctness, and defect escape rate
• Maintain visibility of systemic technical risk and drive retirement of high-risk paths
• Lead critical design decisions with hands-on coding, prototypes, and proofs of concept
• Drive convergence on shared patterns, libraries, and standard approaches across the group
• Design migration paths for large, long-lived systems with minimal user impact
• Incorporate AI platform capabilities into Core DevOps and validate on large-scale systems
• Escalation point for complex technical decisions across the group
• Review designs and MR scope in critical paths to teach and guide
• Ensure designs work across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and Self-Managed with multi-tenant and governance limits
• Partner with Infra, Security, and SRE to improve observability and graceful failure
• Inform Product roadmap with architectural constraints and opportunities
• Create clear design documents, narratives, and decision records for independent team alignment
• Develop and mentor Principal/Staff Engineers, contributing to senior IC hiring standards
• Participate in Incident Management on-call rotation and technical interview training

Key requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• 4+ years in Staff/Principal or equivalent senior technical leadership role
• Deep expertise in AI/ML systems, including LLMs and agentic frameworks
• Proven track record in hands-on technical experimentation and translating findings into scalable architecture
• Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems (decomposition, fault tolerance, observability)
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and broad influence across teams
• Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization with excellent written and asynchronous communication

• excellent written communication
• asynchronous collaboration
• mentoring and leadership
• AI/ML systems
• large language models
• agentic frameworks

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