Field Strategist, Forward Deployed Engineer
GitLab · United States
- Hybrid
- Full-time
- $150,000 / year
- United States
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Job highlights
- Shape customer outcomes and product direction.
- Focus on strategic accounts and complex deployments.
- Build reusable solutions and influence product decisions.
- Work at the intersection of engineering and customer success.
- Contribute to GitLab's growth and innovation.
About the role
About GitLab
GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.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.
Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.
An Overview Of This Role
As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab, you will work at the intersection of customer outcomes, product direction, and hands-on engineering. This role is focused on strategic accounts, where you will help customers adopt GitLab and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform in complex enterprise environments, including self-managed, regulated, and constrained deployments. You will guide deep technical discovery, design practical adoption paths, and build reusable solutions that help customers move from early platform use into broader CI/CD, security, compliance, and AI-enabled workflows.This is not a traditional consulting role centered on one-off delivery. Instead, you will use customer issues to create durable technical assets, shape architecture patterns, and influence upstream product and engineering decisions when field needs point to a broader solution. Your work will help reduce time to value for strategic customers while improving how GitLab scales adoption across similar environments.
Some Examples Of Our Projects
- Building a regulated-environment deployment accelerator for GitLab Duo Agent Platform in self-managed or constrained environments
- Authoring reusable reference architectures for AI Gateway, identity, runners, network boundaries, model connectivity, and governance controls
- Identifying a geo-replication gap in a self-managed deployment, tracing it to a root cause in Gitaly or the git backend, and contributing a targeted code or design change upstream
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.
About The Team
The Staff Forward Deployed Engineer works closely with teams across Customer Success, Solutions Architecture, product, and engineering to solve hard adoption problems in enterprise customer environments. We focus on high-leverage technical work for strategic customers, especially when standard approaches do not fully fit the environment or the adoption challenge.We are especially valuable in situations where self-managed deployment models, security and compliance requirements, migration complexity, or AI platform adoption create barriers that standard approaches do not fully address. Success on our team comes from strong technical judgment, a bias for reuse, and the ability to balance immediate customer needs with long-term platform impact.
How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees
- Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.
Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.
GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.
Key skills/competency
- Forward Deployed Engineer
- DevOps
- CI/CD
- Platform Architecture
- Technical Consulting
- Enterprise Deployments
- AI Gateway
- Customer Success
- GitLab
- Software Engineering
Skills & topics
- Field Strategist
- Forward Deployed Engineer
- DevOps
- DevSecOps
- Platform Engineering
- Customer Engineering
- Technical Consulting
- Software Architecture
- GitLab CI/CD
- AI Solutions
- Enterprise Solutions
- Remote Work
How to get hired
- Tailor your resume: Highlight experience in software engineering, platform architecture, and customer-facing roles. Emphasize skills in CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and AI systems.
- Showcase your impact: Provide specific examples of creating reusable technical assets and influencing product development. Quantify achievements where possible.
- Prepare for technical interviews: Be ready to discuss systems design, architecture, and your experience with GitLab, Ruby on Rails, or Go.
- Demonstrate collaboration: Highlight experience working with diverse stakeholders and leading technical conversations in complex environments.
- Understand GitLab's culture: Research GitLab's values, AI integration, and remote-first approach to align your application and interview responses.
Technical preparation
Master GitLab CI/CD and runner configurations.,Practice designing scalable enterprise architectures.,Familiarize with IaC tools like Terraform, Ansible.,Understand LLMs and agentic AI patterns.
Behavioral questions
Describe a complex customer problem solved.,How do you create reusable technical assets?,How do you influence product decisions?,How do you handle ambiguous environments?
Frequently asked questions
- What is the primary focus of the Field Strategist, Forward Deployed Engineer role at GitLab?
- The Field Strategist, Forward Deployed Engineer role at GitLab is focused on strategic accounts, helping enterprise customers adopt GitLab and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform in complex environments. This involves guiding technical discovery, designing adoption paths, and building reusable solutions that impact both customer outcomes and product direction.
- What kind of technical challenges will a Forward Deployed Engineer at GitLab work on?
- Engineers will tackle complex challenges such as deploying the GitLab Duo Agent Platform in regulated or constrained environments, authoring reference architectures for AI Gateway and other components, and even contributing code upstream to resolve issues found in self-managed deployments. The role emphasizes solving adoption problems that standard approaches cannot fully address.
- What programming languages or technologies are most relevant for this role at GitLab?
- Strong software engineering fundamentals are key, with a preference for experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Go. Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD, pipeline design, YAML, runners, GitLab APIs, and infrastructure as code tools like Terraform or Ansible is also highly valuable. Knowledge of LLMs and agentic patterns is beneficial.
- How does GitLab support the professional growth of its Forward Deployed Engineers?
- GitLab offers a Growth and Development Fund to support continuous learning. The company fosters a high-performance culture with continuous knowledge exchange, allowing team members to collaborate with industry leaders and reach their full potential, accelerating their careers within the organization.
- Is travel required for the Field Strategist, Forward Deployed Engineer position at GitLab?
- Yes, travel is expected for strategic customer engagements, architecture workshops, and team coordination. The estimated travel requirement is up to 50%.
- What distinguishes this Forward Deployed Engineer role from traditional consulting positions?
- This role is not a traditional one-off consulting delivery. Instead, Forward Deployed Engineers use customer issues to create durable technical assets, shape architecture patterns, and influence upstream product and engineering decisions. The focus is on creating long-term impact and reusable solutions.
- What is GitLab's stance on AI integration for this role?