Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails), Plan: Planning Views - GitLab

About the Role

GitLab is looking for an experienced Product Engineer with a backend focus to join the Planning Views group. You will help shape the future of our work items platform, which serves millions of items across thousands of projects. You will work directly with product managers and engage with our community to build high-performance, scalable features.

What You’ll Do

• Shape Requirements: Collaborate with Product to define features and break projects into shippable iterations.
• Backend Development: Design and implement features across the GitLab monolith using Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, and REST APIs.
• Performance Optimization: Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale through query optimization, partitioning, and leveraging Elasticsearch or ClickHouse.
• Real-time Systems: Contribute to real-time features to ensure data consistency.
• Mentorship: Support team growth through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance for engineers and open-source contributors.
• Reliability: Participate in on-call rotations and improve observability to maintain system health.

What You’ll Bring

• Product Mindset: Ability to negotiate trade-offs and prioritize user needs.
• Technical Expertise: Proficiency in Ruby and Ruby on Rails within large, mature codebases.
• Database Skills: Strong experience with PostgreSQL performance tuning (indexing, denormalization, partitioning).
• API Design: Experience building scalable GraphQL and REST APIs.
• Leadership: Proven track record of leading projects and mentoring other engineers.
• Communication: Strong written and verbal skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.
• Bonus Points: Experience with AI integration, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python.

About the Team

We are a distributed team of four engineers located across Australia, India, and Europe. We operate on an asynchronous-first basis, working in two-week iterations with a focus on collaboration and continuous improvement.

Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Comprehensive health and well-being support
• Parental leave