Staff Backend Engineer, SSCS: AI Governance

An overview of this role

As a Staff Backend Engineer - AI Governance at GitLab, you'll help define the technical foundation for how GitLab Duo agents are governed at enterprise scale. This role sits where AI systems, compliance, auditability, and backend architecture meet. You'll shape core systems that give customers clear visibility into AI agent activity and the controls they need to manage usage with clarity.

You'll work on backend architecture that enables auditable AI actions, policy-based governance, and enterprise reporting across the GitLab platform. This includes designing systems for AI audit events, policy enforcement, tool governance, and integrations that help organizations analyze and control how AI agents interact with code, pipelines, secrets, and other sensitive resources.

This is a high-impact role for someone ready to set technical direction early, write and review strong design proposals, and influence multiple teams. You'll partner closely with engineering teams working on GitLab Duo and adjacent platform areas to make sure governance capabilities are built into the product in a scalable and consistent way. Your work will help customers in regulated and security-conscious environments adopt AI features with greater trust and operational clarity.

What you’ll do

• Define and drive backend architecture for AI governance systems, including auditability, policy enforcement, and enterprise reporting capabilities, to improve governance coverage and enable reliable enterprise adoption.
• Design the AI audit event system, including event schema, pipelines, storage patterns, retention considerations, and export surfaces, to deliver reliable audit visibility and support customer reporting and compliance requirements.
• Build and guide the integration layer between the Duo Agent Platform and governance capabilities so agent actions can be observed and controlled at the right points in execution, reducing governance gaps across agent workflows.
• Guide technical design for tool and registry governance, including metadata models, permissions, and controls for managed tool usage, enabling safer, more consistent, and more governable tool access.
• Define backend foundations for a declarative policy framework that governs which agents and tools can be used under specific conditions, helping customers enforce governance requirements consistently across environments.
• Drive architectural consistency and implementation quality across teams by reviewing significant merge requests and contributing to technical RFCs, thus mitigating design drift as the product evolves.
• Strengthen team effectiveness and technical decision-making by mentoring other engineers, providing design guidance and feedback, and coordinating efforts across teams to raise the overall technical bar.
• Accelerate delivery and improve consistency across shared initiatives by partnering with engineering teams to align the governance architecture with existing platform patterns and the broader product direction.

What you’ll bring

• Strong experience designing and operating backend systems at scale, especially in domains that require auditability, governance, or compliance.
• Deep knowledge of authorization and access control patterns, such as role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), and policy-as-code approaches.
• Strong Ruby on Rails experience in production SaaS environments.
• Strong Python experience, especially in systems related to AI services, orchestration layers, or service integrations.
• Experience designing REST APIs and GraphQL APIs for internal or external platform use.
• Familiarity with high-scale data and storage systems, including technologies such as Postgres and ClickHouse.
• Proven experience guiding large, cross-team technical efforts in an async, RFC-driven engineering environment.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly in writing and discussion, make sound tradeoffs during design and implementation, and influence technical direction across teams while collaborating and working effectively in a remote setting.

About the team

You'll join the AI Governance team within GitLab's Secure, Scale, and Compliance area. We focus on helping organizations gain visibility into and govern AI usage inside GitLab. Our work spans two broad problem spaces: visibility, such as audit events, usage tracking, and observability, and policy controls, such as controls that help protect projects and meet compliance requirements.

We are building this team alongside a parallel AI Governance team, with both groups contributing to different parts of a fast-changing roadmap. You'll work with a distributed group of engineers and collaborate with adjacent AI and Continuous Delivery teams as we integrate governance capabilities more deeply into the platform. It's an interesting team for engineers who want to work on emerging product challenges at the intersection of AI, compliance, and large-scale enterprise software.