Distinguished Engineer, Core DevOps

About the role

GitLab is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to lead technical direction for its Core DevOps services, including CI, CD, planning, and source control. This senior role shapes architecture, drives quality, and integrates AI-native workflows across high‑traffic, production‑grade systems.

Key responsibilities

• Define and continuously refine the technical roadmap for CI, CD, Plan, and source code experiences, aligning with company‑wide AI and productivity goals.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering to prioritize investments, translate strategic objectives into actionable roadmaps, and oversee implementation.
• Establish measurable quality targets (availability, latency, pipeline success, defect escape) and hold designs to those standards.
• Identify and mitigate systemic technical risks, retire legacy constraints, and drive convergence on shared patterns and libraries.
• Design migration strategies that enable large‑scale system changes without disrupting users.
• Integrate AI platform capabilities, serve as escalation point for complex decisions, and review critical designs and merge requests.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, and SRE to ensure observability, graceful failure handling, and compliance across deployments.
• Mentor Principal and Staff Engineers, contribute to hiring standards, and participate in on‑call incident management.

Required profile

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 4 years in a senior technical leadership role (Staff, Principal, or equivalent).
• Deep expertise in AI/ML systems, large language models, and agentic frameworks at production scale.
• Proven ability to lead hands‑on technical experiments, benchmark evaluations, and translate findings into scalable architecture.
• Strong background in building scalable, multi‑tenant distributed systems with fault tolerance, observability, and operational resilience.
• Experience designing human‑in‑the‑loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices.
• Excellent written and asynchronous communication skills for a fully remote, globally distributed organization.

Required skills

• AI and machine‑learning system design (large language models, agentic frameworks)
• Scalable multi‑tenant distributed architecture
• Service decomposition, fault tolerance, and observability
• Human‑in‑the‑loop controls and responsible AI practices
• CI/CD pipeline engineering
• Collaboration with Infrastructure, Security, and SRE teams

What we offer

• Competitive base salary $250,000–$349,000 USD per year
• Equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan
• Flexible paid time off
• Health, financial, and well‑being benefits
• Team Member Resource Groups and a supportive remote‑first culture