Senior Backend Engineer, Architecture Engineering: Nonlinear Productivity

What you'll do Identify sources of friction across GitLab's software development lifecycle and scope agentic solutions to address them, turning vague pain points into concrete, buildable proposals. Design and build reliable AI-powered systems that follow step-by-step workflows, use tools and safety checks, and correct errors before taking engineering action — the kind of output you can actually trust with real engineering decisions. Build and maintain evaluation tools that judge agent output on correctness, constraint compliance, and cost, not on whether it merely "seems to work." Work across GitLab's codebase as each problem requires, going wherever the friction actually is rather than staying inside one service or product area. Apply distributed systems judgment to identify generated code that may fail under concurrency, at scale, or across self-managed, dedicated, and multi-tenant deployments, catching failures before they reach customers. Collaborate with the India-based group, sharing roadmaps, findings, and reusable agent tooling Take ownership of a greenfield problem space from day one, helping shape a proven internal fix into a capability GitLab could offer customers externally, with your scope and impact free to grow as the team scales. What you'll bring Hands-on experience building agentic or large language model-based systems — multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery patterns — and making them reliable in production, not treated as one-off prompts or demonstrations. A track record of working autonomously in unfamiliar codebases, getting oriented quickly, and driving solutions through completion. Strong distributed systems knowledge, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes, and degradation under load. Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, in that order of team priority, and the ability to read and modify code in the other languages. Helpful experience includes shipping autonomous agents that complete real tasks from start to finish; improving build systems, release processes, review workflows, or other parts of the software development lifecycle; and working with globally distributed teams, large language model workload costs, or production constraints across on-premises, air-gapped, single-tenant, and software-as-a-service deployments. About the team Nonlinear Productivity — shortened internally to "NLP," with no relation to natural language processing — is one of GitLab's newest teams: a strategic incubation group that reports into AI Platform leadership under the direct sponsorship of the CTO. It's split into a US group (this role) and an India-based group working the same charter; the two sync on roadmap and tooling a few times a week but otherwise run day to day on their own. It operates like a startup — no dedicated product manager, no pre-set backlog — and solutions that prove out internally are the team's path to a monetized, customer-facing GitLab offering. It's a good fit for engineers who'd rather go find the next problem than be handed one, and who want a hand in defining a brand-new part of GitLab from its first commit. Remote-Global The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity . Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary. United States Salary Range $139,200 — $235,200 USD How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being Flexible Paid Time Off Team Member Resource Groups Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan Growth and Development Fund Parental Leave Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application. Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process. : Please review our Recruitment . Your privacy is important to us. GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law . If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation , please let us know during the recruiting process .