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GitLab is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for the Portfolio Experience team, a 4-person squad (2 backend, 2 frontend) distributed across Europe and Canada. You'll be a product-minded engineer who balances user needs with technical excellence, spending significant time understanding requirements and shaping feature design alongside building.
You'll evolve the backend architecture powering GitLab's work items platform, which must handle millions of work items across tens of thousands of groups and projects. Key responsibilities include:
- Collaborating with product and engineers to shape requirements, understand user needs, and break complex projects into shippable iterations
- Designing and implementing backend and real-time features in the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and RESTful APIs with subscriptions, prioritizing performance, reliability, and user impact
- Building and evolving portfolio planning capabilities such as work item hierarchy, status rollup, and capacity planning
- Optimizing PostgreSQL performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, partitioning, and moving workloads to Elasticsearch or ClickHouse
- Creating proofs of concept for complex work, maintaining extensive automated test coverage, and supporting safe rollouts with feature flags and observability
- Mentoring engineers and open source contributors through code reviews, pairing, feedback, and contributor issues
- Participating in on-call rotations, troubleshooting production issues, and improving development and review processes
You bring full-stack experience with current backend focus, proficiency in Ruby and Rails, and strong PostgreSQL skills. You have experience leading multi-engineer projects over months, designing scalable GraphQL/REST APIs, and improving large test suites. You communicate clearly in async, distributed environments and ideally have experience integrating AI into workflows or working with Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python.
