Forward Deployed Engineer - UK

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to increase developer productivity and improve operational efficiency. As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you will work at the intersection of customer outcomes, product direction, and hands-on engineering to help customers adopt GitLab in complex enterprise environments.

Responsibilities:

• 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%

Requirements:

• 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