GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security risk, and accelerate digital transformation.
About the Role
As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Gitaly team, you will help build GitLab’s Git data storage tier—a standalone product providing reliable, secure, and fast access to Git repositories through application programming interfaces (APIs) and storage operations. You will work at the boundary between GitLab and Git to make repository access performant and dependable for GitLab.com, self-managed customers, and GitLab Dedicated.
The team's work spans distributed storage, repository management, high availability, performance, observability, and operational excellence. You will balance roadmap delivery, technical improvements, customer/reliability work, and operational support while helping build the next generation of source code management (SCM).
What You'll Do
- Own moderately sized to complex technical initiatives from problem definition and proposal through implementation, rollout, monitoring, and operational follow-through.
- Act as the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for projects by aligning stakeholders, communicating progress and trade-offs, identifying risks, and driving execution.
- Lead technical design for distributed storage, Git repository management, performance, reliability, and scalability problems using data and benchmarking.
- Partner cross-functionally with engineers across Git, Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Dedicated, and customer-facing teams.
- Improve engineering practices through mentoring, documentation, knowledge sharing, design reviews, and constructive code reviews.
- Take operational ownership of systems, including incident response, post-incident improvements, capacity/performance analysis, and customer escalations.
- Identify opportunities to improve workflows through automation, reusable designs, better dashboards, upstream contributions, and testing enhancements.
- Participate in regular on-call rotations and operational support duties.
What You'll Bring
- Significant professional experience building, debugging, and optimizing distributed or highly available software systems in large-scale production environments.
- End-to-end project ownership experience spanning technical design, execution, rollout, and operational support.
- Strong systems design skills with the ability to reason about performance, failure modes, consistency, concurrency, capacity, and observability.
- Track record of influencing technical decisions and collaborating effectively across teams.
- Experience mentoring engineers and elevating team practices around code quality, testing, and documentation.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to clearly explain complex technical concepts and trade-offs.
- Professional experience with Go (or another backend/systems language).
- Hands-on experience operating production systems and participating in incident response.
- Experience with Ruby, Git internals, gRPC, or Git server infrastructure is highly desirable.
About the Team
The Gitaly team includes Backend Engineers who share ownership of the product's design, implementation, reliability, and customer outcomes. We work autonomously while collaborating closely through design discussions, code reviews, incident response, documentation, and asynchronous communication.
Benefits & Perks
- Benefits to support health, finances, and well-being
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
- Growth and Development Fund
- Paid Parental Leave
- Team Member Resource Groups
Timezone overlap
UTC-8–-4
Culture
Async-friendly
Benefits
Health, Equity, ESPP, PTO, Learning, Parental leave, Commission, Wellness
Open to
NA
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