Senior Backend Engineer

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, and reduce security and compliance risk. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster. GitLab is remote-first and embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, implement, and evolve product capabilities while solving high-scope backend problems and influencing technical and product direction. You will work across product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security boundaries, making sound architectural trade-offs and communicating complex ideas clearly in an asynchronous environment.

• Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, making pragmatic choices between modular-monolith code, shared components, or independently operated services.
• Advocate for product quality, security, availability, and performance; define backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, APIs, and operational readiness.
• Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve team delivery practices through code and design reviews.
• Diagnose and prevent performance/reliability issues at scale; participate in incident response and act as a technical owner where appropriate.
• Use AI in production engineering work to improve outcomes, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible, high-judgment use.

• 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; 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.
• 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.

United States Salary Range: $139,200—$235,200 USD. Benefits include Flexible Paid Time Off, Team Member Resource Groups, Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan, Growth and Development Fund, and Parental Leave.