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Staff Software Engineer, Security Factory: Static Analysis
Contract type
Ongoing
Work mode
Remote · Canada, Israel, United States
Experience
Lead / principal · Not stated
Level inferred from job title
Job description
Staff Backend Engineer on GitLab's Security Factory: Code Scanning team, setting technical direction for the static analysis engine that finds security issues in code and for the tooling that validates its findings.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Remote · Canada, Israel, United States
- Pay
- USD 152,800 – 259,200 / year
What you'll do
- Act as the directly responsible individual (DRI) for the team's highest-scope initiatives from design through delivery, shipping large features with minimal guidance and shaping the long-range goals of the team
- Bring systems built by one engineer to team ownership through documentation, tests, and shared review
- Set the technical direction for the AI-assisted tooling that implements, reviews, and validates engine changes and findings, design the checks that decide whether an agent-written change or generated result is fit to merge, and measure detection quality against benchmark applications with known vulnerabilities, including SAST rules mapped to CWE and OWASP and the test fixtures that prove they work
- Own the architecture of the program model (parsing, symbol resolution, intermediate representations, call graphs, and taint and data-flow analysis) and of the pipeline that turns source code into findings, and define how both extend to new languages and frameworks
- Solve technical problems of the highest scope and complexity, actively seek out difficult impediments affecting the whole team, and advocate for improvements to quality, security, and performance with Product Management, UX, and partner teams such as Code Security and Composition Analysis
- Mentor all engineers on the team through code review and pairing, remove blockers to their autonomy, and shepherd the definition and improvement of our internal standards through review
- Participate in on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues
- Define the overarching architecture and specification documents for the engine, delegate component specifications within them, and drive their implementation by AI agents and engineers working independently through phased plans, small reviewable units of change, and specifications kept in lockstep with the code
- Build and maintain the harness, agent instructions, and agentic skills that keep agent-written code trustworthy, including separate coding and reviewing agents, rules and tests the coding agents cannot change, independent review panels of agents from different model providers, and performance, API, and dependency gates, with risky changes escalated to human review
- Stay current with research in program analysis and security, run AI-assisted research and spikes, and turn the findings into prototypes, proposals, and upstream contributions, including responsible disclosure of findings in open source projects
- Take part in on-call or operational support where your team's ownership model requires it
What we're looking for
- Experience building your own LLM tooling, such as a harness, an agent pipeline, or evaluations, with the judgment to know when output is trustworthy and when it isn't
- Extensive professional experience writing, testing, and reviewing production code in Rust, Go, or a comparable systems language, with depth in at least one; willingness to work across Rust, Go, and Ruby
- Experience with performance optimization and with containerized workflows and CI/CD (we use Docker heavily)
- Deep application security experience, such as vulnerability research, secure code review, or writing detection rules, and fluency with vulnerability classes (OWASP Top 10, CWE)
- Demonstrated capacity to communicate clearly and concisely about complex technical, architectural, and organizational problems, and to write architecture and design specifications that bring a team to a decision
- A track record of taking ownership of ambiguous, team-wide problems and shipping them from concept to production with minimal guidance, with specific, regular async updates on progress, blockers, risks, and next steps
- Experience defining a system's overarching architecture, delegating component specifications to engineers and AI agents, and getting them implemented reliably
- A track record of mentoring engineers, raising a team's technical bar, and influencing technical direction by achieving consensus with peers and leadership
Nice to have
- Familiarity with popular web or mobile application frameworks and how they handle input, data, and configuration
- Experience designing guardrails for agent-written code, such as mutation testing, fuzzing, and CI gates the coding agent cannot modify
- A record of engaging with the research community, such as publications, tool papers, or upstream open source contributions in program analysis or security
Your team
Security Factory: Code Scanning
Develops GitLab's SAST capabilities for customer software repositories; works closely with the Code Security team on scanning rules & flows, with Composition Analysis on the broader software supply chain, and with other groups across the Sec Section, relying heavily on asynchronous work across time zones.
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About GitLab
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.
Key facts
- DevSecOps software
- More than 50 million registered users
- More than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab
- All roles are remote, though some may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements
- Embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows