Backend Engineer, AI Engineering: Duo Chat

Details

As a Backend Engineer on the Chat Engine team, you will build the engine behind GitLab Duo Chat, GitLab's conversational AI experience. You will primarily use Python to build and maintain the agentic runtime, including the Flow Registry, LangGraph flows, and the Duo Workflow Service. You will also work in the GitLab Ruby on Rails monolith, where Chat connects with the product.

You will own scoped parts of the system, ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance, and collaborate with the team on larger projects. You will work alongside senior and staff engineers who will partner with you on design and support your growth.

Responsibilities

• Develop secure, well-tested, and performant features and improvements for GitLab Duo Chat.
• Implement and extend agentic flows in Python using LangGraph, registered through the Flow Registry and served by the Duo Workflow Service.
• Integrate Chat capabilities with the GitLab Rails monolith, including its GraphQL API.
• Write maintainable code that meets internal standards for a high-scale environment, including tests with every merge request.
• Review code according to GitLab's Code Review Guidelines and respond promptly to contributions from people outside GitLab.
• Identify technical debt and propose and implement solutions that improve team efficiency.
• Collaborate with Product Management, User Experience, and Frontend team members to improve product quality, security, and performance.
• Participate in Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday, weekend, and occasional night on-call rotations to troubleshoot product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

Requirements

• Professional experience with Python, including building and testing production services.
• Working proficiency with Ruby on Rails, or willingness to learn it.
• Exposure to, or strong interest in, building on large language models, including prompting, tool or function calling, evaluation, and the failure modes of non-deterministic systems.
• Experience designing and building APIs, diagnosing and optimizing performance issues, and working with well-documented third-party services.
• A security-minded development approach that applies secure coding guidelines early in the development process.
• Clear and concise written communication about technical problems and iterative solutions in a remote, largely asynchronous environment.
• Ability to manage work independently, organize priorities, and ask for help when an issue is taking longer than expected.
• Ability to collaborate effectively in a fully remote, intensely iterative environment.
• Experience with LangGraph, LangChain, or a comparable agent orchestration framework.
• Experience with GraphQL and RSpec.
• Experience with the GitLab product as a user or contributor.
• Experience working on a remote, globally distributed team.

About the Team

The Chat Engine team is part of GitLab's AI Engineering organization and owns the AI-powered chat experience embedded across the GitLab platform. Chat Engine is the backend-focused team within the Duo Chat group. Backend, frontend, and AI specialists work asynchronously across time zones, using issues, merge requests, and documentation as primary collaboration tools. The team focuses on expanding generative and agentic AI capabilities, improving the performance and reliability of chat workflows, and strengthening debugging and testing foundations to run AI features safely at scale.

Benefits

• Benefits supporting health, finances, and well-being.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Team Member Resource Groups.
• Equity Compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Growth and Development Fund.
• Parental Leave.
• GitLab is an equal opportunity workplace and affirmative action employer. Accommodation is available during the recruiting process for candidates with disabilities or special needs.