Distinguished Engineer, Agentic SDLC

### Role Overview Distinguished Engineers are recognized experts across multiple technology domains and represent the most senior level of technical leadership. You will immerse yourself in GitLab's product and internal engineering workflows to identify problems addressable by AI agents, validate them via rigorous experimentation, and codify patterns for our millions of users. ### Responsibilities - Define and refine a company-wide technical vision for autonomous, agentic SDLC aligned with product strategy. - Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities across the SDLC (planning, coding, review, security, compliance, operations). - Translate ambiguous problem spaces into concrete, iterable roadmaps. - Lead hands-on experiments to validate where agentic workflows can reshape engineering tasks (MR authoring, test creation, incident response). - Design and implement reference architectures, including orchestration patterns, safety guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls. - Define evaluation frameworks using offline benchmarks and online experiments to measure impact. - Work with engineering teams to embed agentic workflows into day-to-day development. - Define and track core productivity metrics (cycle time, MTTR, MR throughput). - Capture and codify reusable patterns, libraries, and playbooks. - Collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership to convert internal patterns into customer-facing product capabilities. - Ensure designs respect multi-tenant, compliance, and data governance requirements. - Serve as an escalation point for complex technical decisions regarding AI safety and large-scale systems integration. - Mentor Principal and Staff Engineers to raise the bar for technical execution. - Write clear design documents and architecture narratives. - Represent GitLab in the broader ecosystem (conferences, standards groups, open source). - Partner with Security and Compliance to define guardrails and monitoring for AI features. - Work with SRE teams to ensure agentic services are observable, debuggable, and resilient. ### Qualifications - 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leadership role. - Deep expertise in AI and ML systems, including large language models, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflow design at production scale. - Proven track record of leading hands-on technical experimentation and translating findings into architecture decisions. - Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems (service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability). - Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices. - Ability to drive cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and Data/ML teams. - Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing direction without direct authority. - Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization.