SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
GitLab is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Database Excellence group within the Data Engineering organization. This role focuses on building and evolving data frameworks and tooling that keep GitLab's application datastores scalable, healthy, and safe across GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed instances.
Key responsibilities include developing proactive data growth controls for GitLab.com, including retention and lifecycle management frameworks, enforcement of retention policies at schema-change time, and tooling that keeps database growth sustainable as AI-driven development accelerates data accumulation. You'll help teams across GitLab reason confidently about data architecture, placement, and lifecycle management, while proactively identifying saturation points in infrastructure and driving corrective actions with partner teams.
You will design and build data retention and lifecycle management frameworks, including retention policy enforcement, bulk data removal tooling, and automated identification of tables needing retention policies. Build shift-left guardrails such as static analysis checks and schema-change-time enforcement to catch unsustainable data growth patterns before production. Collaborate closely with product management, UX, frontend, infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics teams to design and ship high-performing solutions.
Additional responsibilities include reviewing and improving database-related changes from other engineers and community contributors, ensuring data integrity, safety, and performance across all deployment scenarios. Design, build, and maintain tooling such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks to proactively surface and address scalability and performance issues. Research, design, and implement improvements to data retention, lifecycle management, database performance, scalability, and data health. Document database best practices and data architecture guidance to enable developers to make informed decisions.
This is a fully remote, highly collaborative role working hands-on with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails.
