Staff Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity
Skills
About the role
This is a staff-level backend engineering role on GitLab's newest incubation team, Nonlinear Productivity, working remotely from the US or Canada. The team builds agentic systems that remove friction from GitLab's own software development lifecycle, such as code review and release workflows. It suits an engineer who wants technical ownership of a greenfield effort with no existing playbook. The team is a from-scratch, generalist group with no dedicated product manager, reporting into AI Platform leadership under the CTO.
What you’ll do
- Set technical direction for the team's agentic systems, including orchestration and where a step stays human-owned
- Find and prioritize friction points across GitLab's software development lifecycle and drive fixes through to shipped results
- Work across any part of GitLab's codebase as problems require
- Apply distributed systems judgment to catch generated code that breaks under concurrency or scale
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on agent engineering and distributed systems practices
- Coordinate a few times a week with a counterpart team based in India
- Act as a bar raiser for hiring, owning technical leadership interviews for staff-level candidates
What they’re looking for
- Experience building reliable agentic or LLM-based systems: multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, recovery
- Ability to work autonomously in unfamiliar codebases
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals: coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes
- Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, with ability to read and modify the others
- Track record of turning loosely specified problems into concrete, shippable proposals
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks that distinguish plausible output from correct output
- History of unblocking teammates through design reviews, writing, or mentoring
What’s on offer
- Base salary range of $152,800-$259,200 USD for US-based residents
- Flexible paid time off
- Equity compensation and an employee stock purchase plan
- Growth and development fund
- Parental leave
Questions about this role
Is this role remote?
Yes, it's listed as Remote-Global, open to residents of the USA and Canada.
How much does it pay?
The stated US base salary range is $152,800-$259,200 per year.
What programming languages are required?
Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, with the ability to read and modify code in the others.
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