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GitLab is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Gitaly team, which owns GitLab's Git data storage tier—a critical infrastructure product serving 50+ million registered users and over 50% of the Fortune 100. Gitaly provides reliable, secure, and fast access to Git repositories through APIs and storage operations, handling distributed storage, repository management, high availability, performance, observability, and operational excellence.
In this role, you will own moderately sized to complex technical initiatives from problem definition through implementation, rollout, monitoring, and operational follow-through. You'll act as the directly responsible individual for projects, aligning stakeholders, communicating progress and trade-offs, identifying risks, and driving execution with minimal guidance. You'll lead technical design for distributed storage, Git repository management, performance, reliability, and scalability challenges, using data and benchmarking to inform decisions.
You'll partner across GitLab's engineering teams—including Git, Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Dedicated, and customer-facing teams—to deliver cross-functional outcomes. You'll improve engineering practices through mentoring, documentation, knowledge sharing, design reviews, and constructive code reviews. Operational ownership is central: you'll handle incident response, post-incident improvements, capacity and performance analysis, customer escalations, and regular on-call duties.
You bring significant professional experience building, debugging, and optimizing distributed or highly available software systems in large-scale production environments. You have a track record of owning complex projects end-to-end, with strong systems design skills and the ability to reason about performance, failure modes, consistency, concurrency, capacity, and observability. You've influenced technical decisions, worked effectively across teams, mentored engineers, and improved team practices. Professional experience with Go or another backend/systems language is required; experience with Ruby, Git internals, gRPC, or Git server infrastructure is highly desirable.
