The opportunity
Nonlinear Productivity — shortened internally to "NLP," with no relation to natural language processing — is one of GitLab's newest teams: a strategic incubation group that reports into AI Platform leadership under the direct sponsorship of the CTO. It's split into a US group…
What you'll do
Set the technical direction for the team's agentic systems, from how agents: are orchestrated to where a step should stay human-owned, and defend those calls once they're tested against real code.
Discover and prioritize sources of friction across GitLab's SDLC, driving the: fix — agentic, process-based, or both — from a rough hypothesis through to a shipped, measured result.
Work across any part of GitLab's codebase as the problem requires, since this: team operates like a small, generalist group rather than one scoped to a single service.
Apply distributed systems judgment to catch cases where generated code looks: correct but breaks under concurrency, at scale, or across deployment topologies (including self-managed, dedicated, and multi-tenant environments), and coach others to do the same.
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on agent engineering practices and: distributed systems judgment, through design reviews and pairing that raise the team's collective bar rather than just your own output.
Collaborate with the India-based group a few times a week to align on the: roadmap, and represent the team's technical progress to stakeholders in the Chief Technology Officer's organization.
What they're looking for
- Serve as a bar raiser for the team's hiring, owning the Technical Leadership: round for other Staff-level candidates as the team scales.
- Own a greenfield technical foundation from day one, with your scope and: impact free to grow as the team scales.
