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 Staff Backend Engineer will provide technical leadership across teams, lead large backend initiatives, drive modular architecture modernization, establish engineering standards, and guide AI-assisted engineering adoption.
Responsibilities
- Lead the technical design and delivery of large backend initiatives that span teams, and identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups
- Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture. Lead modernization of the monolith and legacy backends toward modular, reusable, and appropriately independently operated systems — while preventing fragmentation and service sprawl
- Define and improve standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability — plus the build, test, deploy, release, rollback, and production-readiness practices needed to operate modular features safely
- Create the patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation. Establish Go service patterns and Kubernetes operating practices where they matter to our production estate, and guide Rust adoption where it solves a real systems, security, performance, or supply-chain problem
- Take part in on-call and incident response for the systems your teams own, act as a technical escalation point during complex incidents, and turn what you learn into architectural and operational improvements that prevent recurrence
- Shape technical direction across teams without formal authority, and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform-level roadmap decisions and investment trade-offs
- Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, shepherd technical debt reduction and reusable patterns that improve throughput, and raise the technical capability of the wider team
- Lead team-level adoption of AI-assisted and agentic workflows, including the quality, security, privacy, and operational guardrails, and help engineers direct, validate, reject, and course-correct agent output
Skills
- A sustained record of technical leadership across more than one team or a broad product area
- Deep backend architecture and production experience in complex applications, services, or platforms, including scaling or governing APIs, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components
- Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production, and with modular architecture such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, event-driven boundaries, or an equivalent approach
- A strong ability to create alignment through clear written proposals and decision records, so decisions are documented, understood, and adopted without constant escalation
- The ability to balance customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment
- Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and example
- Production experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including the ability to evaluate and improve how a team adopts them
- Go services and APIs at scale
- Kubernetes and cloud-native operations, including deployment, scaling, observability, rollback, and production readiness
- Rust adoption or production ownership for systems, security, performance, or platform components
- Ruby/Rails modularization and large-monolith modernization
- PostgreSQL scaling, data partitioning, queues, messaging, or distributed systems
- Security-sensitive product or software supply chain engineering
- Experience across SaaS, single-tenant, self-managed, or air-gapped deployment constraints
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