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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, modernizing GitLab's monolithic architecture toward modular, reusable systems serving millions of users. Key responsibilities include defining and improving standards for APIs, contracts, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, and operability. You'll establish shared patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, and failure isolation, while guiding adoption of Go services and Kubernetes practices.
The role combines deep backend expertise with systems judgment and product judgment. You'll influence technical direction through written proposals and decision records, partnering with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmap decisions and investment trade-offs. You'll mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, shepherd technical debt reduction, and serve as a technical escalation point during complex incidents.
A key focus area is leading adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows, defining review, quality, security, and privacy guardrails to make them safe and reliable. You'll work across Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, Security, and Data teams, bringing subject matter expertise and driving organizational impact through influence rather than formal authority.
GitLab operates as a remote-first, asynchronous organization where clear written communication and self-direction are essential. You'll own what you build in production, participate in on-call and incident response, and turn operational learnings into architectural improvements.
