Staff Systems Engineer, IT

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 Staff Systems Engineer, IT is a senior, hands-on engineering role for a generalist who is comfortable owning a broad set of platforms. You'll own the systems and integrations behind the employee lifecycle, onboarding, role changes, and offboarding, and you'll build them the way we build software: as infrastructure-as-code, with SRE practices behind them so they are versioned, observable, and reliable. You'll be the technical owner of GitLab's ITSM platform and the AI capabilities layered on top of it, designing virtual agents, agentic workflows, and knowledge experiences that resolve requests before they ever become tickets. You'll also own shared IT infrastructure across our cloud footprint. Working with our AI-enabled ITSM, you'll replace repetitive manual work with durable automation, and you'll partner with End User Services, Security, People, and Finance to scale those solutions company-wide. You'll be measured on automation coverage of lifecycle processes, AI deflection rates, and the reliability of the systems you build. The GitLab Team Member Handbook What You'll Do Design, build, and own end-to-end automation for the employee lifecycle - onboarding, transfers, role changes, and offboarding - so provisioning and deprovisioning happen accurately and with minimal human touch. Serve as the technical owner of GitLab's ITSM platform, including service catalog design, workflow, request/incident/change processes, integrations, and platform upgrades. Increase AI deflection rates for all stakeholders of the ITSM system by deploying and tuning virtual agents, AI search, and agentic resolution, and by measuring what actually resolves requests without human intervention. Identify repetitive, manual workflows across IT and its partner teams and replace them with automation built in our ITSM and Serval. Build and maintain integrations between the ITSM platform and GitLab's core systems, including Okta, Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, JAMF, Fleet, Workday, and GitLab itself. Manage IT-owned infrastructure as code across our cloud environments, so every change ships through version control, code review, and an automated, auditable path to production. Apply SRE principles to the services IT owns: meaningful monitoring and alerting, clear reliability targets, capacity and cost awareness, and blameless post-incident review. Develop the knowledge management and self-service experiences that feed AI deflection: well-structured articles, catalog items, and conversational flows that stay accurate as systems change. Instrument automation and AI performance with clear metrics and dashboards, deflection rate, time to resolution, automation coverage, and failure rates, and iterate publicly on the results. Set engineering standards for the IT automation stack, including version control, testing, code review, environment management, and change control, and mentor support engineers across the IT organization. Partner with Security and Compliance to ensure lifecycle automation and AI workflows meet access, audit, and control requirements, including SOX and SOC 2. Document architecture, runbooks, and design decisions in the handbook so the systems you build are transparent, maintainable, and operable by the whole team. What You'll Bring Breadth as a generalist systems engineer. You have owned a wide range of platforms end to end, and you pick up unfamiliar ones fast enough to own them outright. Solid infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform or similar), with change managed through version control, code review, and automated deployment rather than manual, one-off work. A working command of SRE principles, including observability, monitoring and alerting, reliability targets, and blameless post-incident review, applied to the services you own. Experience running workloads in a major public cloud; working knowledge across all three (AWS, GCP, and Azure) is a plus. Experience designing or operating virtual desktop infrastructure (Azure Virtual Desktop, Amazon WorkSpaces, Citrix, or similar). A track record automating employee lifecycle processes across HRIS, identity, and endpoint management systems for a distributed or remote workforce. Experience with workflow automation and iPaaS tooling (Okta Workflows, Serval, or similar) and with an ITSM platform; experience with a major ITSM platform is a plus. Familiarity with AI-enabled service capabilities such as virtual agents, AI search, and agentic resolution, and an interest in using them to resolve requests without human intervention. Strong scripting and development skills (Python, JavaScript, or similar),