GitLab and the Evolution of DevSecOps

AI coding agents can already reach well beyond the code in front of them. Through connections to tools like Slack, Jira, and Sentry, an agent can pull in issues, discussions, and production signals from across an organization. However, that context is scattered across many separate systems with no shared map of how it all connects and no common controls over what an agent is allowed to touch. For a large enterprise, stitching that together while staying compliant, auditable, and sometimes fully cut off from the internet is a hard problem. GitLab runs one of the major platforms where software gets built, hosted, and shipped. That gives it a wide view of everything around the code, which shapes how it is approaching the agent era. The bet is that AI is most useful when it can draw on the full context of a project and stay under enterprise control, rather than acting as a point tool bolted onto a single repository. Getting there means wrestling with the hard questions about governance, agent identity, and how much autonomy to hand over. Tim Zalman is the VP of Engineering at GitLab. In this episode, he joins Gregor Van to discuss bringing AI to the full software development lifecycle, why running agents under enterprise control matters for governance and auditing, how to track which human is behind an agent's actions, the realities of shipping air gapped software, and how the space is shifting as new players move into code hosting. Gregor Vand is a security focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Hello, and welcome to Software Engineering Daily. My guest today is Tim Zalman. Thank you for joining, Tim. Thanks a lot for the invitation. Great to be here. Yeah. So you are the VP of engineering at GitLab, a company, a platform that I think a lot of our listener base will know about. For those that don't, we'll definitely cover that soon as well. But as we'd like to do, Tim, you've been at GitLab actually for quite a long time. I think nine and a half years at this point. But when I did look at your LinkedIn effectively, I did see you had a, I think a gaming company for a while before that. I'd love to hear just what that journey was doing that and then transitioning to GitLab. Yeah. Happy to do that. Yeah. It's quite a ride at GitLab. I'm here for nine and a half years. I've seen the company go from a 100 and... I think I was 112 or so employee, and now we are at 2,000 plus. And, yeah, my career goes back, I would say, a lot of different stations. I, in reality, started programming at the company of my parents. I learned especially coding from my mother. So this is where I started. I …