Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling 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. GitLab embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows.

As a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group, you’ll work cross-functionally to identify and improve the engineering experience across GitLab’s internal engineering teams. The group currently has six globally distributed teams of Backend Engineers and Software Engineers in Test. This role will work across the entire group to identify and remove the biggest points of friction that affect development at GitLab. Expect to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions, and helping every team deliver.

• Lead and grow a team responsible for developer tooling and internal platform capabilities used by engineering teams to build and operate services.
• Set and execute a roadmap for Kubernetes-based developer workflows, balancing developer experience, platform reliability, security, and operational efficiency.
• Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes, including workloads, networking, configuration and secrets, identity, storage, observability, progressive delivery, and custom resources and controllers.
• Make environment bring-up and teardown deterministic by resolving readiness and ordering dependencies between CRDs, controllers, and workloads.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and application teams to turn Kubernetes capabilities into simple, well-supported workflows.
• Establish engineering standards, documentation, automation, and feedback loops that improve adoption and reduce time from development to production.
• Coach engineers through architectural decisions, incident follow-up, and production operations.
• Represent the team with technical and organizational stakeholders, communicating tradeoffs clearly and using adoption and reliability measures to guide prioritization.

• Deep experience building developer tooling, DevEx platforms, testing frameworks, or CI/CD systems at scale.
• Strong hands-on Go experience designing, implementing, testing, and operating production-quality services, command-line tools, automation, or platform tooling.
• Experience contributing to Ruby-based systems is also valuable.
• Practical Kubernetes experience building or operating production workloads and platform capabilities, including deployments, services, networking, configuration and secrets, observability, resource management, and troubleshooting.
• Depth in Kubernetes deployment lifecycle: Helm-based deployment and release management, kubeconfig and multi-cluster context handling, and integrating third-party operators and their custom resources (CloudNativePG, cert-manager and similar) into working environments.
• Experience designing scalable solutions that improve engineering productivity, test reliability, development environments, or delivery workflows across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence without authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, and product functions.
• Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and production operations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment.
• A product mindset with a passion for empowering developers through simple, reliable, and well-documented workflows.
• Alignment with GitLab values, especially collaboration, iteration, and transparency.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only: $131,600—$282,000 USD. The range does not include bonuses, equity, or benefits. GitLab supports full-time employees with benefits including Flexible Paid Time Off, Team Member Resource Groups, Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan, Growth and Development Fund, and Parental Leave.

Apply through the provided Greenhouse link. GitLab welcomes interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.