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GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership across backend teams and drive large-scale architectural initiatives. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on solving complex, high-scope problems without formal management authority.
You will lead cross-cutting backend initiatives spanning multiple teams, drive the modernization of GitLab's monolithic architecture toward modular, reusable systems at scale. Key responsibilities include defining and improving standards for APIs, contracts, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, and operability across the platform. You'll establish shared patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, and failure isolation, while guiding adoption of Go services and Kubernetes practices, and evaluating Rust where it solves systems, security, or performance challenges.
This role combines deep backend expertise with systems and product judgment, requiring influence across organizational boundaries. You'll partner with Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, Security, Data teams, and engineering managers to shape technical direction through written proposals and decision records. You'll mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, shepherd technical debt reduction, and raise the technical capability of the wider team.
You'll participate in on-call and incident response for systems your teams own, serving as a technical escalation point during complex incidents and turning learnings into architectural improvements. A key focus area is leading adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows while defining review, quality, security, and privacy guardrails.
GitLab is a remote-first, asynchronous organization where clear written communication and self-direction are essential. The role offers genuine leverage—your architectural decisions and platform work multiply across teams and determine how quickly the entire organization can ship.
