Staff Backend Engineer (Python), AI Engineering: Agent Foundations

GitLab is an open-core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating human progress. Our platform unites teams and organizations, breaking down barriers and redefining what's possible in software development. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise and Duo Agent Platform, customers get AI benefits at every stage of the SDLC. 

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

The Agent Foundations group is focused on developing GitLab the foundations of Agents and Flows, an AI system to automate tasks and help increase productivity in your development workflow.

As our new Staff Backend Engineer, you’ll build out our core service written that not only hosts and coordinates our AI agents but also enables both teams inside and outside of GitLab to build their own agents. You’ll be leading efforts to make sure the service follows up-to-date best practices for Python web development and orchestrating the communication between different services via gRPC as well as contributing to the core AI functionality. As a Python engineer through and through you’ll spread your knowledge across a company where the main language is Ruby.

 Some examples of our projects: 

• Duo Workflow Architecture
• Componentizing Duo Workflow Graph

What You’ll Do  

• Write high-quality, efficient, and maintainable code while adhering to best practices and contributing to code reviews
• Build a highly scalable web platform based on Python and gRPC that can be deployed in different environments.
• Design and develop interactions with the latest LLMs.
• Contribute to a testing infrastructure that allows us to verify agentic AI behaviours.
• Embrace continuous learning and stay connected with industry best practices, tools, and technologies around AI to drive improvements in our software.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to engineers across the Code Creation team and collaborate with other teams
• Influence product and engineering decisions by proposing thorough, iterative solutions to complex technical and architectural challenges
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams across product, engineering, marketing, and more
• Represent the team in technical discussions with customers and stakeholders about AI-powered development capabilities
• Participate in Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday, weekend, and/or occasional night on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

What You’ll Bring 

• A deep interest in the way AI will change the process of software development
• Multiple years of experience building Python Web Services in a multi-service environment ( e.g. FastAPI, Starlette)
• Proven ability to architect and lead complex technical projects from concept to production across distributed systems
• Strong experience with AI/ML technologies, including integration with large language models and understanding of prompt engineering
• Deep expertise in performance optimization, particularly for systems handling high-volume API requests
• Experience designing and building distributed systems with a focus on reliability, observability, and scalability
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions and inf