Staff Backend Engineer, Performance Enablement - GitLab

GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

Overview of the Role

As a Staff Backend Engineer in GitLab's Performance Enablement group, you'll define and build the self-serve platform that lets GitLab engineering teams own their performance. You'll give internal teams the tooling and guidance to run performance tests, analyze results, track trends, and meet their own performance requirements throughout the development lifecycle.

We are a platform, not a consulting service: we build capabilities that teams use independently to deliver a reliable, performant GitLab to customers. In this hands-on technical leadership role, you'll work with the Engineering Manager to shape a multi-quarter vision and roadmap, bringing your performance engineering expertise to influence teams across research and development (R&D).

Example Projects

• Building reusable component-level testing, load testing, performance analysis, trend visibility, and artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted engineering skills.
• Enabling teams to test performance throughout the development lifecycle, from local development and continuous integration (CI) workflows through pre-release validation, including modular feature teams' own workflows.

What You'll Do

• Define the team's technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap with the Engineering Manager, identify opportunities for impact across R&D, and advocate for technical priorities with stakeholders.
• Design and build reusable platform capabilities for performance testing, analysis, reporting, and trend visibility, solving complex technical problems and shipping large capabilities with minimal guidance.
• Turn lessons from early team engagements into reusable capabilities, documentation, and onboarding, measured by each new team needing less hands-on support than the last until teams can adopt the platform and manage their performance independently.
• Coordinate with peer teams across Developer Experience, Infrastructure Platforms, and product groups to align priorities and timing.
• Lead AI-first development practices in how we build and what we ship, including AI skills and agent-assisted performance workflows.
• Mentor engineers in performance engineering, platform design, and technical decision-making.
• Serve as a performance expert for other teams and provide technical guidance on initiatives spanning multiple groups.
• Take part in on-call or operational support where your team's ownership model requires it.

What You'll Bring

• Staff-level backend or platform engineering experience, including setting technical direction across a team and the teams around it.
• A track record of building and operating performance testing and analysis systems, with an understanding of where bottlenecks appear and how to find them.
• Experience leading or anchoring a performance enablement or platform function and achieving measurable adoption of internal tooling by influencing engineers and leaders who don't report to you.
• Experience defining and delivering a multi-quarter technical strategy or roadmap with engineering leadership.
• An AI-first development mindset demonstrated across the software lifecycle, including shaping how a team uses AI.
• Hands-on experience with load and performance testing tools such as k6 or equivalent, Kubernetes, and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or similar cloud infrastructure.
• Clear written, asynchronous communication, including explaining performance trade-offs to engineers and leadership.

About the Team

Performance Enablement is part of Platform Enablement within Developer Experience and Infrastructure Platforms. We work asynchronously and collaborate broadly across R&D, coordinating with peer platform and product groups. Documentation, onboarding, and feedback loops help us turn early team engagements into capabilities that scale beyond individual teams.