Intermediate Backend Engineer, Cells Infrastructure - GitLab

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation.

An Overview of This Role

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer on GitLab's Cells Infrastructure team, you'll help build the architecture that lets GitLab.com scale horizontally. Cells splits GitLab.com into independent units, each with its own application and data stack, behind a shared routing layer.

You'll build the services and application changes that make Cells work: the control plane that tracks cells and organizations, the routing logic that sends each request to the right cell, and the changes inside the GitLab application that keep data unique and consistent across cells. Your work will directly support moving customer organizations onto Cells, one of GitLab's most important scaling initiatives.

You'll work across Go, Ruby on Rails, and TypeScript.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain the Cells control plane, a Go service using gRPC and backed by Cloud Spanner that tracks cells, organizations, and globally unique resources.
• Extend the global routing layer, written in TypeScript on Cloudflare Workers, so requests reach the right cell. This includes classifying requests by path, namespace, and token, and supporting more protocols and services.
• Make changes in the GitLab Rails application so it works across multiple cells: claiming globally unique resources, propagating organization context, and keeping cell-local data consistent.
• Design APIs and data models with correctness, idempotency, and backward compatibility in mind, so changes can roll out safely across a fleet of cells.
• Write thorough automated tests, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and improve test coverage and reliability across owned services.
• Instrument services with OpenTelemetry for metrics, logs, and distributed tracing. Help define service level objectives (SLOs) and take part in on-call rotations for the services you build.
• Work with product teams to make their features cell-compatible, and review their changes for Cells correctness.
• Write clear design documents, architecture decision records, and documentation, and participate in code review as both author and reviewer.

What You'll Bring

• Professional experience building and running backend services in production, including monitoring, debugging, and incident response. Experience instrumenting services with OpenTelemetry and using distributed tracing.
• Proficiency in Go, or strong experience in another backend language and willingness to work in Go daily.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails and TypeScript, or the willingness to become productive in both.
• Experience designing APIs using gRPC or REST, and working with relational or distributed databases (schema design, transactions, migrations).
• Strong understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, such as consistency, idempotency, concurrency, retries, and failure handling.
• Solid grounding in engineering best practices: test-driven development, small iterative merge requests, thorough code review, feature flags, and observable code.
• Experience working effectively in distributed, all-remote teams with asynchronous, written-first communication.
• Experience with Cloud Spanner, Cloudflare Workers, Kubernetes, or multi-tenant/sharded architectures is a plus.

About the Team

The Cells Infrastructure team is part of GitLab's Scale & Architecture organization. We mix Backend Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers who work side by side on the same services, including provisioning cells across AWS and GCP, ring-based deployments, platform SLOs/on-call, and infrastructure for moving customer organizations between cells.

We're an all-remote, asynchronous team. We make decisions in GitLab issues, use directly responsible individuals (DRIs) to own technical direction, demo our work weekly, and use AI-assisted workflows every day.

Employee Benefits

• Benefits to support health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave
• Team Member Resource Groups