About the Role
GitLab is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Portfolio Experience team. You will be a product-focused engineer responsible for evolving the backend architecture that powers our work items platform, serving millions of items across thousands of projects.
What You’ll Do
- Product Collaboration: Work with product managers and engineers to shape requirements and break complex projects into shippable iterations.
- Feature Development: Design and implement backend and real-time features in the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and RESTful APIs.
- Performance Optimization: Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale through query optimization, indexing, denormalization, and partitioning.
- Architecture: Build and evolve portfolio planning capabilities, including work item hierarchy, status rollup, and capacity planning.
- Quality & Reliability: Maintain extensive automated test coverage and support safe rollouts using feature flags and observability.
- Mentorship: Mentor engineers and open-source contributors through code reviews, pairing, and hackathons.
- Operations: Participate in on-call rotations and contribute to root cause analysis.
What You’ll Bring
- Experience: Proven track record of leading multi-month projects and mentoring other engineers.
- Technical Skills: Proficiency in Ruby and Ruby on Rails; strong understanding of PostgreSQL performance tuning.
- API Design: Experience designing scalable GraphQL and/or RESTful APIs.
- Communication: Strong written and verbal skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.
- AI Integration: Experience integrating AI into development workflows is highly valued.
- Mindset: A user-centric approach to engineering, balancing technical trade-offs with product needs.
About the Team
We are a distributed team of 4 (Backend and Frontend) located across Europe and Canada. We own the work item hierarchy (Epic, Issue, Task) and top-down planning capabilities. We operate in an async-first environment with two-week iterations.
Timezone overlap
UTC-8–-4
Culture
Async-friendly
Open to
NA
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