Field Strategist, Forward Deployed Engineer

An overview of this role

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you will work at the intersection of customer outcomes, product direction, and hands-on engineering. This role is focused on strategic accounts, where you will help customers adopt GitLab and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform in complex enterprise environments, including self-managed, regulated, and constrained deployments. You will guide deep technical discovery, design practical adoption paths, and build reusable solutions that help customers move from early platform use into broader CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI-enabled workflows.

This is not a traditional consulting role centered on one-off delivery. Instead, you will use customer issues to create durable technical assets, shape architecture patterns, and influence upstream product and engineering decisions when field needs point to a broader solution. Your work will help reduce time to value for strategic customers while improving how GitLab scales adoption across similar environments.

Some examples of our projects:

• Building a regulated-environment deployment accelerator for GitLab Duo Agent Platform in self-managed or constrained environments
• Authoring reusable reference architectures for AI Gateway, identity, runners, network boundaries, model connectivity, and governance controls
• 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, evaluate constraints, and identify high-value adoption opportunities across GitLab and GitLab Duo Agent Platform. Lead architecture and delivery design for complex enterprise environments where platform migration, regulated requirements, and product boundaries intersect. 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, deployment patterns, and reusable accelerators across source code management, CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI-enabled workflows. Architect self-managed and enterprise deployments, including runners, access controls, network boundaries, observability, AI Gateway, model connectivity, and governance controls. Turn recurring field patterns into reusable assets such as runbooks, templates, design notes, technical guidance, product briefs, and reference architectures that can be used across accounts. Contribute code, technical designs, or architecture changes when strategically necessary, in partnership with product and engineering, to address blockers that should be solved upstream. Travel as needed for strategic customer engagements, architecture workshops, and team coordination, with expected travel up to 50%.

What you'll bring

Experience in 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, ideally with experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Go. Strong systems design and software architecture skills, with experience evaluating APIs, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD systems, security boundaries, scalability, and operational tradeoffs. Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline design, YAML, runners, and GitLab APIs. Experience with infrastructure as code and enterprise deployment tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, or similar approaches. Working knowledge of large language models, agentic patterns, tool orchestration, and the practical limits of AI systems in production environments. A track record of creating reusable technical assets that outlive a single engagement, along with strong written and verbal communication skills for technical design and architecture guidance. Comfort leading conversations with senior stakeholders across security, compliance, engineering, platform, and business teams, especially in ambiguous enterprise environments.

About the team

The Staff Forward Deployed Engineer works closely with teams across Customer Success, Solutions Architecture, product, and engineering to solve hard adoption problems in enterprise customer environments. We focus on high-leverage technical work for strategic customers, especially when standard approaches do not fully fit the environment or the adoption challenge.

We are especially valuable in situations where self-managed deployment models, security and compliance requirements, migration complexity, or AI platform adoption create barriers that standard approaches do not fully address. Success on our team comes from strong technical judgment, a bias for reuse, and the ability to balance immediate customer needs with long-term platform impact.