Staff Backend Engineer (Go), Events Platform - GitLab

About the Role

As a Staff Backend Engineer on GitLab's Events & Messaging Platform team, you will be a foundational technical leader for a high-visibility infrastructure initiative. You will lead the consolidation of GitLab's existing async systems (Sidekiq and a purpose-built event bus) into a single, durable, scalable messaging and event-processing platform.

What You'll Do

• Technical Leadership: Decompose complex architectural designs into well-scoped, deliverable work and drive the team to ship with quality.
• System Architecture: Solve high-complexity engineering problems, focusing on durability, tenant isolation, and horizontal scalability.
• Mentorship: Set the technical bar through code reviews, mentorship, and leading by example.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Represent the team in architectural discussions and contribute to technical proposals.
• Reliability: Participate in on-call rotations to ensure GitLab.com availability targets are met.
• Migration: Lead the migration of existing production workloads off legacy systems without disrupting traffic.

What You'll Bring

• Go Expertise: Deep professional experience building backend services in Go within high-scale production environments.
• Distributed Systems: Demonstrated expertise in durable workflow execution, state persistence, and event-driven architectures.
• Infrastructure: Extensive hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes at scale, including blue/green and canary deployment patterns.
• Tooling: Strong familiarity with GitOps workflows and policy-based governance.
• AI Integration: Proven ability to incorporate AI tools into daily engineering workflows to drive efficiency.
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with a bias toward async, documentation-first practices.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AI engineering or building AI-integrated product features.
• Ruby on Rails experience.

How GitLab Supports You

• Comprehensive benefits for health, finances, and well-being.
• Flexible Paid Time Off.
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Growth and Development Fund.
• Parental Leave and Team Member Resource Groups.