Staff Backend Engineer, AMER - GitLab

About the Role

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across your team and adjacent teams, solving the highest-scope and most complex problems. You will lead large, cross-cutting backend initiatives, drive our modular architecture strategy, and define the standards that enable teams to move faster without compromising quality, security, or reliability.

Why You’ll Love This Role

• Leverage: Your work multiplies across teams, determining how quickly others can ship.
• Genuinely Hard Problems: Lead the modernization of a large monolith toward modular, reusable systems at scale.
• Influence Without Bureaucracy: Shape technical direction through clear written proposals and decision records.
• Frontier AI Work: Lead the adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows with robust safety guardrails.
• Autonomy: Thrive in a remote-first, asynchronous organization where clear communication is the pillar of success.

What You’ll Do

• Lead Cross-Cutting Initiatives: Design and deliver large backend initiatives and remove systemic bottlenecks.
• Own Architecture Strategy: Drive modular backend, service, and data architecture; modernize legacy backends while preventing service sprawl.
• Set the Standards: Define best practices for APIs, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, and observability.
• Establish Shared Patterns: Create patterns for dependency management, data ownership, and service maturity. Guide Go and Rust adoption where appropriate.
• Own Production: Participate in on-call and incident response, turning learnings into architectural improvements.
• Influence and Partner: Collaborate with Product and Engineering leadership on platform-level roadmaps.
• Grow Engineers: Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers and raise the technical capability of the wider team.
• Lead AI Adoption: Guide team-level adoption of AI-assisted workflows and define quality/privacy guardrails.

What You’ll Bring

• Cross-Team Technical Leadership: A sustained record of leadership across multiple teams or broad product areas.
• Deep Architecture Experience: Expertise in scaling complex applications, services, or platforms.
• Modularization in Production: Experience modernizing monoliths using bounded contexts, package encapsulation, or service extraction.
• Influence Without Authority: Ability to create alignment through clear written documentation.
• Product Judgment: Ability to balance customer outcomes, delivery speed, and long-term technical health.
• Mentorship: Experience shaping standards through code review and documentation.
• Agentic AI Leadership: Production experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Helpful Experience

• Go services and APIs at scale.
• Kubernetes and cloud-native operations.
• Rust adoption for systems or security components.
• Ruby/Rails modularization.
• PostgreSQL scaling, data partitioning, and distributed systems.
• Security-sensitive product or software supply chain engineering.