Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), Production Engineering: Tenant Controls

Details

GitLab is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design, implement, and evolve backend capabilities for a global platform used by millions. The role involves solving complex technical problems, influencing technical and product direction, and improving system quality, reliability, and performance in a remote-first, asynchronous environment.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, choosing between modular-monolith code, shared components, and independently operated services.
• Influence team objectives, technical direction, and long-range goals in partnership with product managers and designers.
• Define backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, APIs, and operational readiness.
• Advocate for quality, security, availability, and performance.
• Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve 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 where appropriate.
• Experiment with and integrate agentic AI into production engineering workflows, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible use.

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, with the ability to learn and adapt rather than relying on mastery of a single language.
• Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures.
• Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear asynchronous written communication.
• Experience building or operating agentic AI systems in production, including loops, tool use, and error-handling strategies that support reliability at scale.

Helpful, but not required:

• Experience with high-throughput distributed systems, concurrency, or profiling.
• Experience with containerized production operations, such as Kubernetes.
• Database performance experience with PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, schema evolution, or partitioning.
• Experience with large-scale modular monoliths or event-driven systems.
• Public technical communication, open source maintenance, or developer-focused SaaS experience.

About the Team

The Tenant Controls team within Production Engineering owns application-level rate limiting on GitLab.com. The team builds the framework that defines, counts, and observes every application rate limit and migrates existing implementations onto it. Its mission is to provide GitLab.com with a single way to define, configure, and observe rate limits so operators can understand them during an incident and change them without a deployment.

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