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Salary: USD 152,800 - 259,200 / annual
GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for the Core DevOps team, an AI-powered DevSecOps platform trusted by over 50 million users and 50% of the Fortune 100. In this role, you will provide technical leadership across your team and adjacent teams, leading large backend initiatives and guiding the modernization of a large monolith into modular, reusable systems.
You will work cross-functionally with Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, Security, Data, Engineering Managers, and engineers across product groups. Your responsibilities include leading the technical design and delivery of backend initiatives that span teams, identifying and removing systemic bottlenecks, and driving modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture. You will define and improve standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability.
Key responsibilities include establishing patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, and service maturity; establishing Go service patterns and Kubernetes operating practices; guiding Rust adoption where it addresses systems, security, performance, or supply-chain needs; participating in on-call and incident response; serving as a technical escalation point during complex incidents; partnering with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmap decisions; and mentoring Senior and Intermediate engineers while reducing technical debt.
The Core DevOps team owns core repository capabilities, from Git command-line operations to web-based code exploration, building features and platforms while improving maintainability, accessibility, performance, and workflows for teams using AI-assisted development tools.
GitLab operates in an all-remote, asynchronous environment where you communicate decisions clearly in writing and work independently. The company embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Record of leading technical work across more than one team or a broad product area
- Deep backend architecture and production experience with complex applications, services, or platforms, including APIs, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components
- Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production using modular approaches such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, or event-driven boundaries
- Experience building alignment through clear written proposals and decision records
- Experience making trade-offs among customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment
- Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and practice
- Production experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including improving how a team adopts them
