Distinguished Engineer, Core DevOps

Details

GitLab is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to lead technical direction across its Core DevOps services, including continuous integration, continuous deployment, planning, and source control experiences. The role focuses on improving quality, converging systems on a coherent architecture, reducing technical risk, and supporting AI-native development across long-lived, high-traffic production systems.

Responsibilities

• Set and continuously refine the technical direction for CI, CD, Plan, and source code experiences.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering on planning, technical investment, and engineering priorities.
• Translate company-wide productivity, quality, and AI-native engineering goals into technical direction and iterative roadmaps.
• Define measurable quality standards for availability, p95 and p99 latency, pipeline success rate, test reliability, data correctness, and defect escape rate.
• Identify and reduce systemic technical risks, including single points of failure, unowned critical paths, brittle CI/CD and Plan coupling, scaling limits, and architectural constraints.
• Lead complex design decisions through hands-on code, prototypes, and proofs of concept.
• Drive adoption of shared patterns, libraries, and paved paths across the group.
• Design incremental migration strategies using dual runs, measurable rollback plans, and clear deprecation timelines.
• Adopt AI platform capabilities and productivity initiatives in Core DevOps and provide feedback to the AI organization.
• Serve as the escalation point for complex or contested technical decisions.
• Review significant designs and merge requests in critical paths, using reviews to mentor engineers.
• Ensure designs work across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments while respecting multi-tenant, compliance, and data governance requirements.
• Partner with Infrastructure, Security, and SRE to improve observability, debuggability, and graceful failure handling.
• Communicate architectural constraints and opportunities to Product through roadmap planning.
• Write design documents, architecture narratives, and decision records.
• Develop Principal and Staff Engineers and contribute to the technical hiring bar for senior individual contributors.
• Participate in the Incident Management on-call rotation for GitLab.com and complete Interview Training to participate in technical hiring.

Requirements

• 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 experience leading hands-on technical experimentation, defining evaluation frameworks, running benchmarks, and translating findings into scalable architecture decisions.
• Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, including service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability, and operational resilience.
• Experience designing and implementing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices for production systems.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams or divisions without direct authority.
• Excellent written and asynchronous communication skills, with the ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization.

Compensation

The United States base salary range for this role is $250,000–$349,000 USD. The range excludes bonuses, equity, and benefits. Grade level and salary are determined based on factors including education, experience, skills, internal equity, market data, and geographic location.

Benefits

• Health, financial, and well-being benefits
• Flexible paid time off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

GitLab's roles are remote, subject to location-based eligibility requirements. GitLab is an equal opportunity workplace and an affirmative action employer.