Staff Backend Engineer, AMER

Details

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership across teams, solve complex backend problems, lead large cross-cutting initiatives, drive modular architecture, and define standards for quality, security, reliability, and operability. This is a remote-first, asynchronous technical leadership role involving collaboration with Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, Security, Data, Engineering Managers, and engineers across product groups.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and delivery of large backend initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups.
• Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture.
• Modernize monolithic and legacy backends into modular, reusable, and appropriately independently operated systems while preventing fragmentation and service sprawl.
• Define standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, maintainability, deployment, release, rollback, and production readiness.
• Establish patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation.
• Establish Go service patterns and Kubernetes operating practices, and guide Rust adoption where appropriate.
• Participate in on-call and incident response, act as a technical escalation point, and turn incidents into architectural and operational improvements.
• Shape technical direction across teams without formal authority and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmaps and investment trade-offs.
• Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers and improve technical capability across the wider team.
• Lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows, including quality, security, privacy, and operational guardrails.

Requirements

• Sustained technical leadership experience across more than one team or a broad product area.
• Deep backend architecture and production experience with complex applications, services, or platforms.
• Experience scaling or governing APIs, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components.
• Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production.
• Experience with modular architecture approaches such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, event-driven boundaries, or equivalent methods.
• Ability to create alignment through clear written proposals and decision records.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to balance customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment.
• Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and example.
• Production experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows.

Helpful Experience

• Go services and APIs at scale.
• Kubernetes and cloud-native operations, including deployment, scaling, observability, rollback, and production readiness.
• Rust adoption or production ownership for systems, security, performance, or platform components.
• Ruby/Rails modularization and large-monolith modernization.
• PostgreSQL scaling, data partitioning, queues, messaging, or distributed systems.
• Security-sensitive product or software supply chain engineering.
• SaaS, single-tenant, self-managed, or air-gapped deployment constraints.

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.

Compensation

The United States base salary range for this role is $152,800–$259,200 USD. The range applies to United States residents and excludes bonuses, equity, and benefits. Grade level and salary ranges are determined based on interviews, education, experience, skills, abilities, internal equity, market data, and geographic location.

GitLab is a remote organization and hires team members in countries around the world. Some roles may have location-based eligibility requirements.