Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

CX Forward Deployed Engineer

An overview of this role

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you will help close the gap between what the GitLab platform and GitLab Duo Agent Platform can do and what strategic customers can activate today. You will work directly with customers, GitLab account teams, and GitLab product and engineering teams as a consultative engineering partner to accelerate adoption in complex, high-value environments. This is a deeply technical, customer-facing role where 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.

In this role, you will focus on making customer progress repeatable. That means turning real-world adoption challenges into reusable assets, architecture patterns, and product feedback that can scale beyond a single account. You will operate with architectural depth across enterprise deployments, including regulated and self-managed environments, while helping shape how GitLab and Duo Agent Platform are used in practice. This role sits within GitLab’s Revenue organization and reports to the Director, Forward Deployed Engineering.

Some examples of our projects:

• Building deployment accelerators and reference architectures for GitLab Duo Agent Platform in constrained or regulated environments
• Creating reusable migration tooling and adoption patterns that help customers expand from source code management into CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI workflows

What you'll do

• Conduct deep technical discovery in strategic customer accounts to assess platform readiness, identify constraints, and find the highest-leverage adoption opportunities across GitLab and Duo Agent Platform.
• Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments, including self-managed, regulated, migration-heavy, or security-sensitive deployments.
• Partner with customer stakeholders and GitLab account teams to prioritize use cases based on business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability, and long-term platform value.
• Design and build bounded proofs, prototypes, reusable components, and accelerators across source code management, CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI workflows.
• Author reference architectures, deployment standards, runbooks, and technical guidance that reduce time to value across multiple customer environments.
• Prototype, validate, and harden Duo Agent Platform workflows using custom agents, custom flows, GitLab APIs, integrations, CI/CD automation, and policy-aware deployment patterns.
• Contribute production-ready code, design documents, or architecture changes when needed, working with GitLab Engineering to turn recurring field patterns into product improvements.
• Travel for strategic customer engagements, architecture workshops, and team on-sites as needed.

What you'll bring

• Significant experience across software engineering, platform architecture, forward deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-facing engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the ability to read, reason about, and contribute to production systems, with experience in technologies relevant to GitLab such as Ruby on Rails and/or Go.
• Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline design, YAML, runners, GitLab APIs, and the broader DevSecOps workflow.
• Strong systems design and enterprise architecture skills, with the ability to balance security, reliability, operational simplicity, and adoption needs.
• Experience creating reusable technical assets such as accelerators, frameworks, tools, standards, reference architectures, or design guidance that outlive a single engagement.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or similar approaches.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience leading technical discovery and architecture conversations with senior stakeholders.
• Working knowledge of large language models, agent-based workflows, and the practical limits of AI systems in production environments, along with comfort working in GitLab’s remote, asynchronous, and values-driven culture.

About the team

The Forward Deployed Engineer is part of GitLab’s Forward Deployed Engineering function within the Revenue organization. This team works at the intersection of customer outcomes, platform architecture, and product insight. Their goal is to help strategic customers make meaningful technical progress while ensuring that each engagement produces something reusable for the broader field, product, or engineering organization.

This team is especially focused on environments where standard approaches are not enough, such as self-managed deployments, regulated settings, complex migrations, or advanced AI workflow activation. Rather than acting as long-term embedded delivery, the team serves as a strategic multiplier by building durable assets, clarifying architecture decisions, and helping GitLab learn from real customer constraints. The work is highly cross-functional and collaborative, with close partnership across Professional Services, Customer Success, Support, Solution Architecture, Product, and Engineering.

The team operates in GitLab’s all-remote and asynchronous environment, with a strong focus on transparency, iteration, and measurable impact. A core challenge for the team is balancing near-term customer needs with long-term reuse, so that solutions improve outcomes not just for one account, but across many future engagements.