Senior Backend Engineer, Database Excellence (Ruby) - GitLab

About the Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer with the Database Excellence group, you will build and evolve the data frameworks and tooling that keep GitLab's application datastores scalable, healthy, and safe. You will focus on proactive data growth controls, retention frameworks, and lifecycle management to ensure sustainable performance as AI-driven development accelerates data accumulation.

What You'll Do

• Develop Data Frameworks: Build backend features that ensure safe and efficient data handling across SaaS and self-managed deployments.
• Lifecycle Management: Design and implement retention policy enforcement, bulk data removal tooling, and automated table identification.
• Build Guardrails: Create shift-left tools, such as static analysis and schema-change-time enforcement, to prevent unsustainable data growth.
• Collaborate: Work with product, UX, infrastructure, and analytics teams to design high-performing solutions.
• Maintain Tooling: Manage SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks to address scalability issues.
• Database Health: Research and implement improvements for performance, scalability, and data health, including soft delete strategies and migration testing.
• Documentation: Establish database best practices and architecture guidance for the engineering organization.

What You'll Bring

• PostgreSQL Expertise: Professional experience in large, complex production environments, including high availability, zero-downtime migrations, and partitioning.
• Ruby Proficiency: Strong experience with Ruby on Rails or similar Ruby frameworks.
• System Thinking: Ability to reason about software design, algorithms, and performance trade-offs at a system level.
• Communication: Excellent written communication skills for an asynchronous, all-remote environment.
• Autonomy: A self-directed work style with the ability to manage priorities as a "manager of one."
• On-call: Willingness to participate in a tier 2 database on-call rotation in your time zone.

Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave
• Comprehensive health, financial, and well-being benefits