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GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership across backend teams and adjacent functions. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on solving high-scope, complex problems without formal management authority.
You will lead large, cross-cutting backend initiatives and drive GitLab's modular architecture strategy. Key responsibilities include: leading the technical design and delivery of initiatives spanning multiple teams; owning backend, service, data, and platform architecture decisions; defining standards for APIs, contracts, testing, security, performance, observability, and operability; establishing shared patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, and failure isolation; participating in on-call and incident response as a technical escalation point; mentoring Senior and Intermediate engineers; and shaping technical direction across teams through influence and partnership rather than formal authority.
You will work across Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Engineering teams, bringing deep subject matter expertise. The role emphasizes influence without bureaucracy—using clear written proposals and decision records to drive platform roadmap and investment trade-offs. You'll lead 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 platform serves more than 50 million registered users and over 50% of the Fortune 100. You'll work on genuinely hard problems: modernizing a large monolith toward modular, reusable systems at massive scale, preventing service sprawl, and establishing Go and Rust patterns where they solve real systems, security, or performance challenges.
