Staff Backend Engineer, EMEA

Details

GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps that helps organizations improve developer productivity, operational efficiency, security, compliance, and digital transformation. The company operates as a remote-first, asynchronous organization and expects team members to incorporate AI into their daily workflows.

About the Role

The Staff Backend Engineer will provide technical leadership across the team and adjacent teams, solving complex, high-scope problems. The role will lead large, cross-cutting backend initiatives, drive modular architecture strategy, and define standards that enable teams to move quickly while maintaining quality, security, reliability, and operability.

This technical leadership role requires deep backend expertise, systems and product judgment, and the ability to influence across organizational boundaries without formal authority. The engineer will collaborate 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 toward modular, reusable, and independently operated systems while preventing fragmentation and service sprawl.
• Define standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability.
• Establish build, test, deploy, release, rollback, and production-readiness practices.
• Create shared 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 it addresses systems, security, performance, or supply-chain requirements.
• Participate in on-call and incident response, act as a technical escalation point, and convert incident learnings into architectural and operational improvements.
• Shape technical direction across teams and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmaps and investment trade-offs.
• Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, reduce technical debt, and improve reusable engineering patterns.
• 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.
• Production experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture.
• Experience with modular architecture, such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, event-driven boundaries, or equivalent approaches.
• Ability to create alignment through clear written proposals and decision records.
• 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, including evaluating and improving team adoption.

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.
• Remote-first, asynchronous work environment.

Additional Information

GitLab hires remote team members worldwide, although some roles have location-based eligibility requirements. The company is an equal opportunity workplace and provides accommodations during the recruiting process when needed.