Staff Backend Engineer, Core DevOps

Job description

About this role

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

Responsibilities

• - Lead the technical design and delivery of backend initiatives that span teams, and identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups.
• - Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture, including modernization of the monolith and legacy backends while preventing fragmentation and service sprawl.
• - Define and improve standards for application programming interfaces, 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 where they matter to the production estate, and guide Rust adoption where it addresses systems, security, performance, or supply-chain needs.
• - Take part in on-call and incident response for systems your teams own, serve as a technical escalation point during complex incidents, and turn lessons from incidents into lasting improvements.
• - Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmap decisions and investment trade-offs.
• - Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, reduce technical debt, build reusable patterns that improve team throughput, and lead adoption of artificial intelligence-assisted and agentic workflows with quality, security, privacy, and operational guardrails.

Qualifications and requirements

• - A record of leading technical work across more than one team or a broad product area.
• - Deep backend architecture and production experience with complex applications, services, or platforms, including application programming interfaces, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components.
• - Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production and using modular approaches such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, or event-driven boundaries.
• - Experience building alignment through clear written proposals and decision records so teams document, understand, and adopt technical decisions.
• - Experience making trade-offs among customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment.
• - Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and practice.
• - Production experience with artificial intelligence-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including improving how a team adopts them.