Distinguished Engineer Agentic SDLC and Non-Linear Productivity

Skills

About the Role

You will shape the technical vision for autonomous, agentic software-development workflows and identify high-impact opportunities across planning, coding, review, security, compliance, and operations. You will lead hands-on experiments, prototypes, and evaluations; design reference architectures with safety, observability, and human controls; and drive selected internal use cases through adoption and measurable productivity gains. You will define productivity metrics, document reusable patterns and architectural decisions, guide complex technical decisions, mentor senior engineers, and help convert validated internal patterns into reliable product capabilities.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
• Expertise in AI and ML systems, including large language models, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflow design at production scale.
• Experience leading technical experimentation, defining evaluation frameworks, running benchmarks, and translating findings into scalable architecture decisions.
• Experience with scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability, and operational resilience.
• Experience designing and implementing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices.
• Ability to drive cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and Data and ML teams.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams or divisions.
• Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization with strong written and asynchronous communication skills.
• Familiarity with GitLab's DevSecOps platform, CI/CD primitives, and the software development lifecycle is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define and refine the technical vision for autonomous agentic SDLC.
• Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities across the software development lifecycle.
• Translate ambiguous problem spaces into iterative roadmaps.
• Lead experiments and prototypes for autonomous engineering workflows.
• Design and implement reference architectures for agentic SDLC.
• Define evaluation frameworks for correctness, latency, safety, cost, and productivity.
• Drive high-impact internal use cases from concept through adoption.
• Embed trusted, observable, and resilient agentic workflows into daily development.
• Define and track productivity metrics including cycle time, MTTR, and merge-request throughput.
• Codify reusable patterns, libraries, and playbooks.
• Convert proven internal patterns into safe and reliable product capabilities.
• Ensure designs meet multi-tenant, compliance, and data-governance requirements.
• Resolve complex technical and architectural decisions involving agentic workflows and AI safety.
• Mentor Principal and Staff Engineers working on AI and agentic initiatives.
• Write design documents, architecture narratives, and decision records.
• Represent the organization at conferences, standards groups, and open-source communities.
• Define guardrails, review processes, and monitoring with Security and Compliance.
• Ensure agentic services are observable, debuggable, resilient, and degrade gracefully with Reliability and SRE teams.

Benefits

• Benefits supporting health, finances, and well-being.
• Flexible Paid Time Off.
• Team Member Resource Groups.
• Equity compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Parental Leave.