Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), Plan: Portfolio Experience

Details

GitLab is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for the Portfolio Experience team. This is a product engineering role with a current focus on backend development. The engineer will help evolve the backend architecture powering the work items platform, which serves millions of work items across tens of thousands of groups and projects.

The team works asynchronously in two-week iterations and owns work item hierarchy, including Epic, Issue, and Task relationships, as well as top-down planning capabilities such as status rollup and capacity planning.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product managers and engineers to shape requirements, understand user needs, and break complex projects into shippable iterations.
• Design and implement backend and real-time features in the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and RESTful APIs and subscriptions, with a focus on performance, reliability, and user impact.
• Build and evolve portfolio planning capabilities, including work item hierarchy, status rollup, and capacity planning.
• Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, partitioning, and moving suitable workloads to Elasticsearch or ClickHouse.
• Create proofs of concept for complex work, maintain extensive automated test coverage, and support safe rollouts with feature flags and strong observability.
• Mentor engineers and open source contributors through code reviews, pairing, regular feedback, contributor issues, and hackathons.
• Participate in on-call rotations, troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve the team's development and review processes.

Requirements

• Experience representing the user perspective while working through trade-offs with product managers, engineers, and users.
• Experience leading projects involving several engineers over multiple months and supporting others through code reviews, feedback, hiring, career development, and mentoring.
• Full stack experience with a current backend focus, including proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails and an understanding of complex modern frontends.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills and experience improving database performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, and partitioning.
• Experience designing and evolving GraphQL and/or RESTful APIs with attention to scalability, backward compatibility, and clear contracts with frontend clients.
• Experience improving large automated test suites, including the performance and reliability of the tests themselves.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.
• Experience integrating artificial intelligence into development workflows.
• Experience building artificial intelligence-powered features or working with Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python is a plus.

Team

The team consists of four members: two Backend Engineers and two Frontend Engineers located across Europe and Canada. The team works async-first in two-week iterations, with retrospectives and a weekly sync.

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 states that all roles are remote, although some roles may have specific location-based eligibility requirements.