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GitLab is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design, implement, and evolve product capabilities on its intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. In this role, you will solve high-scope backend problems and influence the technical and product direction of your teams, moving beyond assigned work to actively improve system quality, reliability, and performance.
You will design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, making pragmatic architectural choices between modular-monolith code, shared components, or independently operated services. You'll advocate for product quality, security, availability, and performance by defining backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, APIs, and operational readiness. Mentoring associate and intermediate engineers is a key responsibility—you'll remove technical blockers and improve team delivery practices through code and design reviews.
Operational excellence is critical: you'll diagnose and prevent performance and reliability issues at scale, participate in incident response, and act as a technical owner where appropriate. A distinctive aspect of this role is integrating agentic AI into production engineering workflows—moving beyond simple prompt engineering to build resilient, AI-assisted systems. You'll use AI to improve outcomes, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible, high-judgment use.
You'll work across product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security boundaries, making sound architectural trade-offs and communicating complex ideas clearly in an asynchronous, remote-first environment. You'll partner closely with product managers and designers to shape requirements and ensure every technical decision delivers genuine value to users.
Required expertise includes deep backend architecture knowledge, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in complex product environments. You should be proficient in modern backend languages with a deep understanding of systems programming, valuing adaptability over mastery of a single language. Architectural judgment is essential—experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures is expected. Proven experience building or operating agentic systems in production is required, demonstrating expertise beyond prompt engineering in architecting loops, tool-use, and error-handling strategies that ensure reliability at scale. You'll lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear written communication, effectively bridging product needs and technical reality.
