Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps that helps organizations improve developer productivity, operational efficiency, security, compliance, and digital transformation. The Senior Backend Engineer will identify friction across the software development lifecycle and build reliable AI-powered automation, evaluation tools, and distributed systems solutions to address it.
Responsibilities
- Identify sources of friction across GitLab's software development lifecycle and scope agentic solutions to address them, turning vague pain points into concrete, buildable proposals
- Design and build reliable AI-powered systems that follow step-by-step workflows, use tools and safety checks, and correct errors before taking engineering action — the kind of output you can actually trust with real engineering decisions
- Build and maintain evaluation tools that judge agent output on correctness, constraint compliance, and cost, not on whether it merely "seems to work."
- Work across GitLab's codebase as each problem requires, going wherever the friction actually is rather than staying inside one service or product area
- Apply distributed systems judgment to identify generated code that may fail under concurrency, at scale, or across self-managed, dedicated, and multi-tenant deployments, catching failures before they reach customers
- Collaborate with the India-based group, sharing roadmaps, findings, and reusable agent tooling
- Take ownership of a greenfield problem space from day one, helping shape a proven internal fix into a capability GitLab could offer customers externally, with your scope and impact free to grow as the team scales
Skills
- Hands-on experience building agentic or large language model-based systems — multi-step orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and recovery patterns — and making them reliable in production, not treated as one-off prompts or demonstrations
- A track record of working autonomously in unfamiliar codebases, getting oriented quickly, and driving solutions through completion
- Strong distributed systems knowledge, including coordination, consistency, idempotency, rate limiting, failure modes, and degradation under load
- Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python, in that order of team priority, and the ability to read and modify code in the other languages
- Helpful experience includes shipping autonomous agents that complete real tasks from start to finish; improving build systems, release processes, review workflows, or other parts of the software development lifecycle; and working with globally distributed teams, large language model workload costs, or production constraints across on-premises, air-gapped, single-tenant, and software-as-a-service deployments
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
Company Overview