Senior Backend Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE GitLab is a leading DevSecOps orchestration platform trusted by more than 50 million users and over half of the Fortune 100. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, implement, and evolve core product capabilities, tackling high‑scope backend challenges and shaping the technical and product direction of the organization. Your work will span product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security teams, influencing architectural trade‑offs and setting standards for a high‑scale, global platform. WHAT YOU'LL DO You will design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, choosing between modular‑monolith code, shared components, or independent services. You will advocate for product quality, security, availability, and performance, defining backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, APIs, and operational readiness. Mentoring associate and intermediate engineers, you will remove technical blockers and improve delivery practices through code and design reviews. You will diagnose and prevent performance and reliability issues at scale, participate in incident response, and act as a technical owner when needed. Additionally, you will integrate agentic AI into production engineering workflows, evaluating its effectiveness and coaching others on responsible use. WHAT YOU'LL NEED Deep expertise in backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning within a complex product environment. Proficiency in modern backend languages and systems programming, with a focus on learning and adapting across languages. Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration‑safe architectures. Strong influence skills, technical judgment, and clear written communication to bridge product needs and technical reality. Proven experience building or operating agentic systems in production, including architecting loops, tool‑use, and error‑handling strategies for reliability at scale. Signals of additional fit include experience with high‑throughput distributed systems, concurrency, profiling, containerized production operations (e.g., Kubernetes), deep database performance knowledge (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, schema evolution, partitioning), large‑scale modular monoliths or event‑driven systems, and public technical communication or open‑source maintenance. WHY REMOTE The role is fully remote, supporting a flexible, asynchronous work environment that values clear written communication and self‑direction. You will collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineers worldwide, contributing to a culture that embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier and encourages experimentation with agentic AI in production. BENEFITS Benefits include comprehensive health coverage, financial wellness programs, parental leave, education stipends, life insurance, equipment stipends, and flexible scheduling.