Senior Backend Engineer, Core DevOps - 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. We embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued, driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange.

About the Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, implement, and evolve product capabilities while solving high-scope backend problems and influencing the technical and product direction of our teams. You will actively improve the quality, reliability, and performance of our systems, working across product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security boundaries. This role involves making sound architectural trade-offs, communicating complex ideas clearly in an asynchronous environment, and helping define standards for a high-scale, global product.

Why You’ll Love This Role

• High Impact: Shape the architecture of a global platform used by millions.
• Technical Agency: Influence team objectives, technical direction, and long-range goals, solving problems of high scope and complexity.
• Innovative Culture: Experiment with and integrate agentic AI into production engineering workflows, moving beyond simple prompt engineering to build resilient, AI-assisted systems.
• Autonomy: Thrive in our remote-first, asynchronous organization, where clear written communication and self-direction are pillars of success.
• User-Centric Collaboration: Partner closely with PMs and designers to shape requirements, ensuring technical decisions deliver genuine value to users.

What You’ll Do

• Drive Technical Direction: Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, making pragmatic choices between modular-monolith code, shared components, or independently operated services.
• Raise the Bar: Advocate for product quality, security, availability, and performance. Define backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, APIs, and operational readiness.
• Mentor & Lead: Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve team delivery practices through code and design reviews.
• Operational Excellence: Diagnose and prevent performance/reliability issues at scale. Participate in incident response and act as a technical owner where appropriate.
• AI Integration: Use AI in production engineering work to improve outcomes, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible, high-judgment use.

What You’ll Bring

• Deep Backend Expertise: A strong command of backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in a complex product or service environment.
• Adaptability: Proficiency in modern backend languages and a deep understanding of systems programming. We value the ability to learn and adapt over mastery of a single language.
• Architectural Judgment: Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures.
• Influence: Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear written communication, effectively bridging the gap between product needs and technical reality.
• Agentic AI Expertise: Proven experience building or operating agentic systems in production—moving beyond prompt engineering to architecting loops, tool-use, and error-handling strategies that ensure reliability at scale.

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.