Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, helping organizations improve developer productivity, operational efficiency, security, compliance, and digital transformation. The Senior Backend Engineer will design and evolve backend product capabilities, solve high-scope problems, influence technical direction, and improve system quality, reliability, and performance. The role also involves mentoring engineers, participating in incident response, and integrating agentic AI into production engineering workflows.
Responsibilities
- **Drive Technical Direction:** Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, making pragmatic choices between modular-monolith code, shared components, or independently operated services
- **Raise the Bar:** Advocate for product quality, security, availability, and performance. You will define backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, APIs, and operational readiness
- **Mentor & Lead:** Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve team delivery practices through code and design reviews
- **Operational Excellence:** Diagnose and prevent performance/reliability issues at scale. Participate in incident response and act as a technical owner where appropriate
- **AI Integration:** Use AI in production engineering work to improve outcomes, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible, high-judgment use
Skills
- A strong command of backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in a complex product or service environment
- Proficiency in modern backend languages and a deep understanding of systems programming. We value the ability to learn and adapt over mastery of a single language
- Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures
- Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear written communication, effectively bridging the gap between product needs and technical reality
- Proven experience building or operating agentic systems in production—moving beyond prompt engineering to architecting loops, tool-use, and error-handling strategies that ensure reliability at scale
- Experience with high-throughput distributed systems, concurrency, or profiling
- Hands-on experience with containerized production operations (e.g., Kubernetes)
- Deep database performance knowledge (e.g., PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, schema evolution, partitioning)
- Background in large-scale modular monoliths or event-driven systems
- Public technical communication, open-source maintenance, or experience in developer-focused SaaS
Benefits
- Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
- All of our roles are remote
Company Overview