Field Strategist, Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

In this role, you will focus on strategic accounts, helping customers adopt GitLab and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform. This involves conducting technical assessments, designing solutions for enterprise environments, and collaborating with various stakeholders to prioritize use cases.

Success in this position means effectively addressing customer needs in regulated and complex deployments, creating reusable technical assets, and contributing to the overall platform strategy. You will also engage in hands-on coding and architecture design when necessary.

The salary range for this role is between $80,500 and $138,000, depending on experience and qualifications.

Skills that matter here

• Ruby on Rails: This role requires experience with Ruby on Rails to contribute to production systems.
• Go: Experience with Go is essential for building and maintaining software in this position.
• CI/CD: Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD is necessary for designing deployment pipelines.
• YAML: Knowledge of YAML is important for configuring CI/CD systems.
• Terraform: Experience with Terraform is required for infrastructure as code and enterprise deployments.
• Ansible: Familiarity with Ansible is needed for deployment tooling in complex environments.

Who this role suits

• A candidate with a strong technical background and experience in customer-facing engineering roles.
• Someone who is comfortable engaging with senior stakeholders and navigating ambiguous enterprise situations.
• A person who values creating reusable technical assets and has strong communication skills.
• An individual who is proactive in identifying high-value opportunities and driving customer success.

From the employer

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.