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Staff CX Forward Deployed Engineer

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you will close the gap between what the GitLab platform and Duo Agent Platform can do and what strategic customers can activate today. Working alongside customers, GitLab account teams, and GitLab product and engineering teams as a consultative engineering partner, you will accelerate adoption in high-value environments while turning real customer challenges into reusable assets, architecture patterns, and product signals that scale beyond any single account.

 

This is a deeply technical, highly visible, customer-facing role within GitLab’s Revenue organization. You will partner closely with Professional Services Engineers, Project Managers, Customer Success Managers, Support Engineers, Product Engineers, Solution Architects, and other cross-functional teams to connect business priorities to sound technical execution. This is not long-term embedded delivery or staff augmentation, but a strategic multiplier. The role is builder-first: 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.

 

Forward Deployed Engineers report to the Director, FDE. You’ll be expected to operate with architectural depth, build reusable solutions across customer environments, and help inform the future direction of the platform through hands-on engineering work.

Levels

• Senior Forward Deployed Engineer
• Staff Forward Deployed Engineer
• Director of Forward Deployed Engineering

Performance Indicators

• Deliver measurable progress against defined success criteria for platform adoption, developer experience, and AI workflow activation in selected strategic customer environments, tracked quarterly
• Increase GitLab platform and Duo Agent Platform adoption and consumption in assigned accounts, measured by usage growth, activation of priority workflows, and sustained usage over time
• Reduce critical technical blockers and churn-risk indicators in covered accounts, measured by issue resolution, time-to-remediation, and improvement in renewal readiness
• Produce reusable tooling, architecture patterns, and reference implementations that are adopted across multiple customer engagements
• Contribute validated product feedback, design artifacts, or code that results in platform improvements, upstream contributions, or broader internal adoption
• Establish and evolve a GitLab Well-Architected Framework, measured by its completion, internal adoption, field usage, and application in customer environments
• Convert customer-specific learnings into repeatable guidance, enablement materials, and technical assets that improve consistency and speed across field teams
• Earn strong stakeholder confidence through technical execution, architectural judgment, and measurable progress against agreed customer and account objectives

Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Examples of the work

• Build a regulated-environment deployment accelerator for GitLab Duo Agent Platform in a self-managed or constrained environment.
• Author a reference architecture for AI Gateway, identity, runners, network boundaries, model connectivity, and governance controls.
• Create migration tooling or adoption patterns that move customers from source-control-only usage into CI/CD, security, and compliance foundations that make DAP valuable.
• Design a reusable compliance-evidence generator or deployment validation framework that can be reused across multiple accounts.
• Investigate a recurring blocker, determine it belongs in product, and partner with Engineering on a design or code contribution rather than leaving the answer as a field workaround.
• Pilot an advanced DAP workflow in a lighthouse account, then package it for Customer Success, Professional Services, or Solution Architecture to use at scale.
• Partner with a strategic customer to identify a high-value adoption bottleneck, prove a working approach, and turn the outcome into reusable guidance or tooling.
• Identifying a geo-replication gap in a self-managed deployment, tracing it to a root cause in Gitaly or the git backend, and contributing a targeted code or design change upstream

What you’ll do

• Conduct deep technical discovery in selected strategic accounts to assess platform readiness, understand constraints, and identify the highest-leverage adoption opportunities across GitLab and DAP.
• Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where DAP, platform migration, regulated constraints, and core-product boundaries intersect.
• Partner with customer stakeholders and GitLab account teams to prioritize high-value use cases based on business impact, technical feasibility, and repeatability.
• Design and build bounded proofs, deployment patterns, reusable components, and accelerators across SCM, CI/CD, security, compliance, and DAP workflows.
• Build rapid proofs or prototypes to validate promising approaches before hardening them into reusable assets, reference architectures, or upstream contributions.
• Design for reuse from the start so that each engagement leaves behind a durable asset such as a runbook, template, reference architecture, code component, design note, or product brief.
• Author reference architectures, deployment standards, and reusable accelerators that materially reduce time to value across multiple customer environments.
• Build hybrid tooling that lives between a product feature and a customer deliverable, especially in self-managed, regulated, or migration-heavy environments.
• Prototype, validate, and harden DAP workflows using custom agents, custom flows, GitLab APIs, MCP integrations, CI/CD automation, and policy-aware deployment patterns.
• Architect self-managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, AI Gateway, model connectivity, observability, and governance controls.
• Translate recurring field patterns into reusable technical guidance, reference assets, product briefs, and design notes for Customer Success, Professional Services, Solution Architecture, Product, and Engineering.
• Contribute production-ready code, design docs, or architecture changes when strategically necessary, with clear Engineering review and handoff.
• Raise the architectural bar through strong technical judgment, reuse discipline, and a clear bias against account-specific one-off solutions.
• Measure success through adoption lift, DAP usage, new lifecycle-stage activation, reusable asset creation, blocker removal, and upstream impact — not through quota or case-study production.
• Lead structured technical discovery in complex enterprise environments, mapping workflows, constraints, and organizational dynamics to identify the highest-leverage adoption opportunities across GitLab and DAP.
• Partner with senior technical and business stakeholders to define phased adoption strategies, success criteria, and architecture decisions aligned to business goals.
• Navigate complex stakeholder environments across security, compliance, platform engineering, and business teams to drive alignment and remove blockers.
• Recommend and prioritize adoption paths and use case portfolios based on business impact, technical feasibility, repeatability, and long-term platform value.

What you’ll bring

• Seven or more years of experience across software engineering, platform architecture, forward-deployed engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-adjacent engineering roles.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with production experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Go; ability to read, reason about, and contribute to a large production codebase.
• Strong systems-design and software-architecture skills, including the ability to reason about APIs, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD systems, security boundaries, scalability, and opera