Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Staff CX Forward Deployed Engineer

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you will close the gap between what the GitLab platform and Duo Agent Platform can do and what strategic customers can activate today. Working alongside customers, GitLab account teams, and GitLab product and engineering teams as a consultative engineering partner, you will accelerate adoption in high-value environments while turning real customer challenges into reusable assets, architecture patterns, and product signals that scale beyond any single account.

This is a deeply technical, highly visible, customer-facing role within GitLab’s Revenue organization. You will partner closely with Professional Services Engineers, Project Managers, Customer Success Managers, Support Engineers, Product Engineers, Solution Architects, and other cross-functional teams to connect business priorities to sound technical execution. This is not long-term embedded delivery or staff augmentation, but a strategic multiplier. The role is builder-first: you will use strong engineering judgment to decide whether the right answer is platform configuration, accelerator tooling, reference architecture, or a strategic contribution back to the core product.

Forward Deployed Engineers report to the Director, FDE. You’ll be expected to operate with architectural depth, build reusable solutions across customer environments, and help inform the future direction of the platform through hands-on engineering work.

Levels

• Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
• Staff Forward Deployed Engineer
• Director of Forward Deployed Engineering

Performance Indicators

• Deliver measurable progress against defined success criteria for platform adoption, developer experience, and AI workflow activation in selected strategic customer environments, tracked quarterly
• Increase GitLab platform and Duo Agent Platform adoption and consumption in assigned accounts, measured by usage growth, activation of priority workflows, and sustained usage over time
• Reduce critical technical blockers and churn-risk indicators in covered accounts, measured by issue resolution, time-to-remediation, and improvement in renewal readiness
• Produce reusable tooling, architecture patterns, and reference implementations that are adopted across multiple customer engagements
• Contribute validated product feedback, design artifacts, or code that results in platform improvements, upstream contributions, or broader internal adoption
• Establish and evolve a GitLab Well-Architected Framework, measured by its completion, internal adoption, field usage, and application in customer environments
• Convert customer-specific learnings into repeatable guidance, enablement materials, and technical assets that improve consistency and speed across field teams
• Earn strong stakeholder confidence through technical execution, architectural judgment, and measurable progress against agreed customer and account objectives

Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Examples of the work

• Build a regulated-environment deployment accelerator for GitLab Duo Agent Platform in a self-managed or constrained environment.
• Author a reference architecture for AI Gateway, identity, runners, network boundaries, model connectivity, and governance controls.
• Create migration tooling or adoption patterns that move customers from source-control-only usage into CI/CD, security, and compliance foundations that make DAP valuable.
• Design a reusable compliance-evidence generator or deployment validation framework that can be reused across multiple accounts.
• Investigate a recurring blocker, determine it belongs in product, and partner with Engineering on a design or code contribution rather than leaving the answer as a field workaround.
• Pilot an advanced DAP workflow in a lighthouse account, then package it for Customer Success, Professional Services, or Solution Architecture to use at scale.
• Partner with a strategic customer to identify a high-value adoption bottleneck, prove a working approach, and turn the outcome into reusable guidance or tooling.
• Identifying a geo-replication gap in a self-managed deployment, tracing it to a root cause in Gitaly or the git backend, and contributing a targeted code or design change upstream

What you’ll do

• Conduct deep technical discovery in selected strategic accounts to assess platform readiness, understand constraints, and identify the highest-leverage adoption opportunities across GitLab and DAP.
• Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where DAP, platform migration, regulated constraints, and core-product boundaries intersect.
• Partner with customer stakeholders and GitLab account teams to prioritize high-value use cases based on business impact, technical feasibility, and repeatability.
• Design and build bounded proofs, deployment patterns, reusable components, and accelerators across SCM, CI/CD, security, compliance, and DAP workflows.
• Build rapid proofs or prototypes to validate promising approaches before hardening them into reusable assets, reference architectures, or upstream contributions.
• Design for reuse from the start so that each engagement leaves behind a durable asset such as a runbook, template, reference architecture, code component, design note, or product brief.
• Author reference architectures, deployment standards, and reusable accelerators that materially reduce time to value across multiple customer environments.
• Build hybrid tooling that lives between a product feature and a customer deliverable, especially in self-managed, regulated, or migration-heavy environments.
• Prototype, validate, and harden DAP workflows using custom agents, custom flows, GitLab APIs, MCP integrations, CI/CD automation, and policy-aware deployment patterns.
• Architect self-managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, AI Gateway, model connectivity, observability, and governance controls.
• Translate recurring field patterns into reusable technical guidance, reference assets, product briefs, and design notes for Customer Success, Professional Services, Solution Architecture, Product, and Engineering.
• Contribute production-ready code, design docs, or architecture changes when strategically necessary, with clear Engineering review and handoff.
• Raise the architectural bar through strong technical judgment, reuse discipline, and a clear bias against account-specific one-off solutions.
• Measure success through adoption lift, DAP usage, new lifecycle-stage activation, reusable asset creation, blocker removal, and upstream impact — not through quota or case-study production.
• Lead structured technical discovery in complex enterprise environments, mapping workflows, constraints, and organizational dynamics to identify the highest-leverage adoption opportunities across GitLab and DAP.
• Partner with senior technical and business stakeholders to define phased adoption strategies, success criteria, and architecture decisions aligned to business goals.
• Navigate complex stakeholder environments across security, compliance, platform engineering, and business teams to drive alignment and remove blockers.
• Recommend and prioritize adoption paths and use case portfolios based on business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability, and long-term platform value.

What you’ll bring

• Seven or more years of experience across software engineering, platform architecture, forward-deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-adjacent engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with production experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Go; ability to read, reason about, and contribute to a large production codebase.
• Strong systems-design and software-architecture skills, including the ability to reason about APIs, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD systems, security boundaries, scalability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Demonstrated experience architecting enterprise-scale systems that balance security, reliability, operational simplicity, and adoption needs.
• Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline architecture, YAML, runners, GitLab APIs, and the broader DevSecOps workflow.
• Deep curiosity about how GitLab is built, including comfort navigating platform boundaries and determining when a problem belongs in configuration, a shared accelerator, or core product.
• Track record of creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, such as frameworks, accelerators, tools, standards, or design guidance.
• Experience contributing to shared platforms, internal developer tooling, or core product capabilities in collaboration with engineering teams.
• Experience leading architecture conversations with senior technical stakeholders and navigating security, compliance, platform, and business tradeoffs.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling, such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or equivalent approaches.
• Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, tool orchestration, and the practical limitations of AI systems in production environments.
• Strong preference for experience with self-managed GitLab, regulated deployment models, and familiarity with GitLab internals and contribution workflows.
• Strong written communication, including the ability to author technical design documents, architecture guidance, and concise product briefs that Engineering and Product can act on.
• Customer-facing experience in complex enterprise environments with the ability to navigate ambiguity without defaulting to custom one-off delivery.
• Experience leading technical discovery and architecture conversations with senior stakeholders, including directors, VPs, and cross-functional technical leaders.
• Proven ability to translate ambiguous business challenges into concrete technical direction, architectural decisions, and reusable solutions.
• Experience navigating complex organizational dynamics and building alignment across security, compliance, engineering, and business stakeholders.
• Track record of influencing product direction through field insight, technical design, reusable assets, or upstream contributions.

Requirements

Required qualifications

• Seven or more years of experience across software engineering, platform architecture, forward-deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-adjacent engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the ability to read, reason about, and contribute to production systems.
• Demonstrated experience architecting enterprise-scale systems that balance security, reliability, operational simplicity, and adoption needs.
• Experience navigating ambiguous technical problems, conducting structured discovery, and translating findings into clear technical direction, implementation plans, or reusable solutions.
• Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline design, YAML, runners, and GitLab APIs.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or equivalent approaches.
• Experience creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, such as frameworks, accelerators, tools, standards, reference architectures, or design guidance.
• Experience leading technical and architectural conversations with senior stakeholders and navigating security, compliance, platform, and business tradeoffs.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to author technical design documents, architecture guidance, and concise product or engineering briefs.
• Customer-facing experience in complex enterprise environments, with the ability to operate with high autonomy without defaulting to one-off delivery.
• Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, and the practical limitations of AI systems in production environments.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with self-managed GitLab architecture, administration, upgrades, or air-gapped deployment patterns.
• Direct familiarity with GitLab internals or contribution workflows, including experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, Sidekiq, Gitaly, runners, or adjacent backend systems relevant to GitLab extension points.
• Experience with platform engineering or internal developer platform concepts such as golden paths, paved roads, service templates, developer portals, or self-service provisioning.
• Experience authoring reference architectures, design standards, or technical frameworks adopted across multiple teams or customer environments.
• Experience in regulated environments where security, compliance, auditability, or data-sovereignty requirements materially influence architecture decisions.
• Experience contributing to shared platforms, internal developer tooling, or core product capabilities in collaboration with engineering teams.
• Python or TypeScript experience for automation, integrations, prototyping, or AI workflow tooling.

Travel

Travel should support strategic customer engagements, team on-sites, and key architecture workshops. This role is expected to travel less than a traditional billable consulting role, but has an expected range of up to 50%.