Staff Backend Engineer (Ruby), AI Engineering: DAP Repository Flows

An overview of this role

The DAP Repository Flows team owns two areas within GitLab's Duo Agent Platform (DAP). The first is DAP onboarding, helping customers quickly set up a project so they can start using the Duo Agent Platform with minimal friction. The second is repository and background flows: autonomous and scheduled agents that work on a customer's codebase on their behalf.

This work is central to how GitLab delivers AI-powered automation on repositories. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will set technical direction for the team, drive complex initiatives across team boundaries, and raise the engineering bar for how we build agentic experiences on top of the Duo Agent Platform.

What you'll do in this role

• Set and drive the technical direction for the DAP Repository Flows team, making architecture decisions that shape how onboarding and repository/background flows are built.
• Lead the design and delivery of autonomous and scheduled agents that operate on customer codebases, building on top of the Duo Agent Platform.
• Design and refine the DAP onboarding experience so customers can get a project configured and productive quickly.
• Partner across teams in the broader DAP organization to align on interfaces, shared patterns, and platform capabilities.
• Mentor senior and intermediate engineers, review designs and code, and elevate the team's overall technical quality.
• Identify and resolve the hardest technical problems the team faces, and prevent them where possible through sound design.
• Contribute to a culture of autonomy, ownership, high context sharing, and async-first collaboration.

What we're looking for

• Deep, hands-on experience with Ruby and Ruby on Rails in production systems.
• Demonstrated experience integrating LLMs into products (product integration, not ML model training).
• Experience building agentic systems: autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that take actions on a user's behalf.
• A track record of designing and shipping complex, high-scale systems and driving technical direction across teams.
• Strong written communication and the ability to operate effectively in a distributed, async-first environment.
• The judgment and influence expected of a staff-level engineer: setting direction, unblocking others, and multiplying the team's impact.

About the team

The DAP Repository Flows team is part of GitLab's broader Duo Agent Platform organization, within the AI/R&D group. The team is small and distributed, with plans to grow. We value autonomy, ownership, and high context sharing, and we work async-first through GitLab issues and Slack.