Principal Engineer

About the company

• GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps with more than 50 million registered users.
• The AI Engineering organization builds GitLab Duo Agent Platform, the agentic orchestration layer running AI agents and flows across the software lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Define technical direction for a significant area of Duo Agent Platform across several teams and partner with Engineering Managers and Product on a six-month roadmap.
• Build the orchestration layer: session lifecycle, tool invocation, context assembly, concurrency, retries, timeouts, graceful failure modes.
• Drive topics from POC and architecture to full implementation across the organization.
• Participate in Incident Management on-call rotation for GitLab.com availability.
• Write design documents, architecture narratives, and decision records.
• Ensure architecture holds across multi-tenant GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments, including self-hosted models.
• Design the extensibility surface for custom agents and flows, external agents like Claude Code and Codex.
• Drive down cost and latency of agentic requests; work on model selection, routing, and credit consumption.
• Define evaluation practice: offline benchmarks and online experiments measuring task completion, correctness, tool-call accuracy, latency, cost.
• Build governance and safety surface with Security and Compliance: policy-driven controls, permission and identity semantics, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, audit.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Engineers; participate in hiring as technical interviewer.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years at Staff/Principal level or equivalent.
• Hands-on production experience building on LLMs: agent loops, tool calling, context management, retrieval, prompt and model evaluation.
• Strong background in distributed systems and architecture.

Conditions

• Remote across Canada, Poland, United Kingdom, United States.
• Reports into the VP of AI Engineering.