Staff Software Engineer

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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.

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Staff Software Engineer

An overview of this role

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll be the founding engineer for a new functional team that owns glab, GitLab’s Go-based command-line interface (CLI) and a key part of our Developer Clients strategy. You’ll guide its technical direction end to end, owning architecture, implementation, roadmap execution, and day-to-day technical choices. You’ll serve a highly technical developer audience and an engaged open source community while working as a self-directed staff engineer in an IC role with minimal guidance.

You’ll work within the Developer Clients group in GitLab’s AI Clients stage, collaborating with engineers across the GitLab Duo CLI and integrated development environment (IDE) extensions. The role is based in Bangalore..

• Guide the technical direction of glab, owning its architecture, implementation, and evolution.

• Design and ship terminal-first features and workflows in Go, with close attention to developer experience, performance, scripting-friendly output, and backwards compatibility.

• Absorb multiple changing inputs from Product, the open source community, and internal teams, re-prioritize as needs change, and keep shipping iterative improvements.

• Partner with Product Management to shape and execute the roadmap by framing problems, making clear trade-offs, and turning feedback into focused, high-impact changes.

• Steer the open source project and community by triaging issues, reviewing and merging contributions, upholding a high quality bar, and saying no respectfully while keeping contributors engaged.

• Work with other Developer Clients teams, including GitLab Duo CLI and IDE extensions, so glab works well with the broader GitLab developer experience and common capabilities.

• Contribute to TypeScript- or JavaScript-based developer tools when features or common components span multiple Developer Clients teams.

• Establish engineering practices for the new functional team and track glab adoption, release quality, and open source community health metrics to guide roadmap and engineering choices.

• Significant professional experience with Go and building command-line interfaces or systems-level tools, including thoughtful command and flag design, clear terminal experiences,