Senior Backend Engineer

Details

GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. The company enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation.

About the Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, implement, and evolve product capabilities while solving high-scope backend problems and influencing the technical and product direction of your teams. You will actively improve the quality, reliability, and performance of systems while working across product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security boundaries. The role involves making architectural trade-offs, communicating complex ideas clearly in an asynchronous environment, and helping define standards for a high-scale, global product.

The role is remote-first and asynchronous. Team members are expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows and use agentic AI responsibly in production engineering work.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance.
• Make pragmatic choices between modular-monolith code, shared components, and independently operated services.
• Define and advocate for backend standards covering style, maintainability, testing, APIs, security, availability, performance, and operational readiness.
• Mentor associate and intermediate engineers.
• Remove technical blockers and improve team delivery practices through code and design reviews.
• Diagnose and prevent performance and reliability issues at scale.
• Participate in incident response and act as a technical owner when appropriate.
• Use AI in production engineering work, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible, high-judgment use.
• Partner with product managers and designers to shape requirements and ensure technical decisions deliver value to users.

Requirements

• Strong command of backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in a complex product or service environment.
• Proficiency in modern backend languages and a deep understanding of systems programming.
• Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures.
• Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear written communication.
• Proven experience building or operating agentic systems in production, including architecting loops, tool use, and error-handling strategies for reliability at scale.

Helpful Experience

• High-throughput distributed systems, concurrency, or profiling.
• Containerized production operations, such as Kubernetes.
• Database performance, including PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, schema evolution, and partitioning.
• Large-scale modular monoliths or event-driven systems.
• Public technical communication, open-source maintenance, or experience in developer-focused SaaS.

Benefits

• Benefits supporting health, finances, and well-being.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Team member resource groups.
• Equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan.
• Growth and development fund.
• Parental leave.

GitLab is an equal opportunity workplace and welcomes candidates with varying levels of experience.