Staff Backend Engineer (Python) - AI Engineering: Agent Foundations
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:
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 influence engineering strategy across multiple teams
Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical capabilities of a team
Excellent written and verbal communication skills for collaborating in a remote, globally distributed environment
Ability to work effectively across different technology stacks and quickly learn new languages and frameworks as needed
Experience with the gRPC framework is a plus.
Experience with languages that our other services use such as Go, Typescript, Ruby or IDE Extension development is a plus.
About the team
The Agent Foundations group is a team distributed across 3 continents but unified by the desire to shape the future of software engineering. We’re hard at work creating a product and the infrastructure that changes development processes, building the tools of tomorrow. We’re partnering with teams both within the AI space as well as all over GitLab to ensure that Duo Agent Platform can become the backbone of many AI features at GitLab.
About the job
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Staff Backend Engineer (Python) - AI Engineering: Agent Foundations
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:
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 influence engineering strategy across multiple teams
Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical capabilities of a team
Excellent written and verbal communication skills for collaborating in a remote, globally distributed environment
Ability to work effectively across different technology stacks and quickly learn new languages and frameworks as needed
Experience with the gRPC framework is a plus.
Experience with languages that our other services use such as Go, Typescript, Ruby or IDE Extension development is a plus.
About the team
The Agent Foundations group is a team distributed across 3 continents but unified by the desire to shape the future of software engineering. We’re hard at work creating a product and the infrastructure that changes development processes, building the tools of tomorrow. We’re partnering with teams both within the AI space as well as all over GitLab to ensure that Duo Agent Platform can become the backbone of many AI features at GitLab.