Intermediate Backend Engineer, Database Automation (Ruby) - 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. Over 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

Our team embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows. GitLab fosters a high-performance culture driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

An Overview of This Role

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer in the Database Automation team, you will develop and enhance frameworks, patterns, and tooling to ensure GitLab's application datastores remain scalable, healthy, and safe across GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed instances. You will collaborate with experienced engineers and cross-functional teams to build reliable backend features, learn best practices in data architecture and lifecycle management, and contribute to performance improvements.

As part of the Data Engineering organization, you will gain hands-on experience with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in an all-remote, team-based environment. You will receive mentorship and grow your skills in data scalability, system design, and addressing complex reliability issues for self-managed customers.

Examples of our projects include:

• SQL Traffic Replay Tooling
• Background Operations Framework

What You'll Do

• Develop and iterate backend features and data frameworks to ensure safe and efficient data operations at scale across GitLab.com and self-managed deployments.
• Collaborate with product management, UX, frontend, infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics teams to design and ship high-performing, reliable solutions.
• Review and improve database-related changes from other engineers and external contributors, ensuring data integrity, safety, and performance across diverse environments.
• Design, build, and maintain tooling and guardrails, such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks, to proactively detect and remediate scalability, performance, and data health issues.
• Research, design, and implement improvements to database performance, scalability, and data health, including soft delete strategies and database migration testing.
• Document database best practices, anti-patterns, and data architecture guidance to enable informed, consistent choices for developers.
• Develop solutions for database upgrade paths and migration strategies that maintain backwards compatibility while reducing downtime and operational friction for self-managed customers with diverse deployment configurations.
• Succeed by shipping incremental improvements and, over time, building the capability to fully own larger pieces of work with shorter revision cycles.

What You'll Bring

• Professional software engineering experience with PostgreSQL in large, complex production environments, including performance tuning and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails or another Ruby framework, with experience designing, implementing, and reviewing backend features and services.
• Ability to reason about software design, algorithms, and performance trade-offs at a system level, particularly in data-intensive applications.
• Strong written communication skills and comfort working asynchronously in an all-remote, distributed team.
• Self-directed work style with effective organizational skills and the ability to manage priorities.
• Alignment with GitLab's values, including transparency, teamwork, inclusion, and contribution to open source practices.
• Openness to learning and applying new tools and approaches, including transferable experience from related data, infrastructure, or developer tooling domains.

About the Team

The Database Automation team is a remote, agile backend team within the Data Engineering organization. We work asynchronously across regions, partner closely with infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics, and take a self-organized approach to improving GitLab.com infrastructure while supporting self-managed customers as they upgrade and scale.

We welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.