Staff Backend Engineer, Core DevOps

Details

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership across the Core DevOps team and adjacent teams. The role involves leading large backend initiatives, modernizing a large monolith into modular and reusable systems, and establishing standards that improve quality, security, reliability, and operability. GitLab operates as an all-remote, asynchronous organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and delivery of backend initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups.
• Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture, including modernization of monolithic and legacy backends.
• Define and improve standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability.
• Establish patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation.
• Establish Go service patterns and Kubernetes operating practices for the production estate.
• Guide Rust adoption where it supports systems, security, performance, or supply-chain requirements.
• Participate in on-call and incident response, act as a technical escalation point, and turn incident lessons into lasting improvements.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmaps and investment trade-offs.
• Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, reduce technical debt, build reusable patterns, and lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic workflows with quality, security, privacy, and operational guardrails.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience leading technical work across multiple teams or a broad product area.
• Deep backend architecture and production experience with complex applications, services, or platforms, including APIs, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components.
• Experience modernizing monolithic or legacy backend architecture in production using approaches such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, or event-driven boundaries.
• Experience building alignment through written proposals and decision records.
• Experience balancing customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment.
• Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and engineering practices.
• Production experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including improving team adoption.

Team

The Core DevOps team owns core repository capabilities, from Git command-line operations to web-based code exploration. The team builds features and platforms while improving maintainability, accessibility, performance, and workflows for teams using AI-assisted development tools.

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

All GitLab roles are remote, although some roles may have location-based eligibility requirements. GitLab is an equal opportunity workplace and provides reasonable accommodations during the recruiting process.