Staff Backend Engineer, India - 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 in your area. You will lead large, cross-cutting backend initiatives, drive our modular architecture strategy, and define the standards that let teams move faster without compromising quality, security, reliability, or operability.

This is a technical leadership role that combines deep backend expertise, systems judgment, product judgment, and influence across organizational boundaries.

Why you’ll love this role

• Leverage: Your work multiplies across teams. The platforms, standards, and architectural decisions you lead determine how quickly everyone else can ship.
• Genuinely Hard Problems: You’ll lead the modernization of a large monolith toward modular, reusable, appropriately independent systems.
• Influence Without Bureaucracy: You’ll shape technical direction through clear written proposals and partner with leadership on platform roadmaps.
• Frontier AI Work: You’ll lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows and define the guardrails that make them safe to rely on.
• Autonomy: You’ll thrive in our remote-first, asynchronous organization.

What you’ll do

• Lead Cross-Cutting Initiatives: Lead technical design and delivery of large backend initiatives and remove systemic bottlenecks.
• Own Architecture Strategy: Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture; lead modernization of the monolith.
• Set the Standards: Define standards for APIs, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, and production-readiness.
• Establish Shared Patterns: Create patterns for dependency management, data ownership, and eventing. Guide Go service patterns and Rust adoption.
• Own What You Build: Participate in on-call and incident response, turning learnings into architectural improvements.
• Influence and Partner: Shape technical direction without formal authority; partner with Product and Engineering leadership.
• Grow Engineers: Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers and raise the technical capability of the wider team.
• Lead AI Adoption: Lead team-level adoption of AI-assisted workflows and define quality and privacy guardrails.

What you’ll bring

• Cross-Team Technical Leadership: A sustained record of technical leadership across multiple teams or broad product areas.
• Deep Architecture Experience: Production experience in complex applications, scaling APIs, and shared backend components.
• Modularization in Production: Experience modernizing monoliths or legacy backends using bounded contexts or service extraction.
• Influence Without Authority: Strong ability to create alignment through clear written proposals and decision records.
• Product Judgment: Ability to balance customer outcomes, delivery speed, and long-term platform investment.
• Mentorship: Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review and documentation.
• Agentic AI Leadership: Production experience with AI-assisted engineering workflows.