Senior Backend Engineer, Database Excellence (Ruby) at GitLab

Role overview

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

As a Senior Backend Engineer with the Database Excellence group , you'll build and evolve the data frameworks and tooling that keep GitLab's application datastores scalable, healthy, and safe across both GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed instances. A primary focus for this role is building proactive data growth controls for GitLab.com, including retention and lifecycle management frameworks, enforcement of retention policies at schema-change time, and tooling that keeps database growth sustainable as AI-driven development accelerates how quickly data accumulates. You'll help teams across GitLab reason confidently about data architecture, placement, and lifecycle management, while proactively identifying saturation points in our GitLab.com infrastructure and driving corrective actions with partner teams. With the team's recent move into the Data Engineering organization, you'll also shape new scalability and data health features for self-managed customers, working hands-on with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in a fully remote, highly collaborative environment.

Data Growth Controls (retention enforcement and data lifecycle management)

Background Operations Framework

GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law . If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation , please let us know during the recruiting process .

Responsibilities

• Lead or deliver technical work for Ruby database systems and reliability.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, services and customer teams.
• Improve reliability, performance, testing, automation and documentation.
• Translate requirements into maintainable software and operational outcomes.

Qualifications

• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails or another Ruby framework, including designing, implementing, and reviewing backend features.
• Ability to reason about software design, algorithms, and performance trade-offs at a system level.
• Strong written communication skills and comfort working asynchronously in an all-remote, distributed team.
• Self-directed work style with effective organizational skills and the ability to manage priorities as a "manager of one".
• Alignment with GitLab's values, including transparency, collaboration, inclusion, and contribution to open source.
• Willingness to participate in our tier 2 dabase on-call rotation in your time zone.
• The Database Excellence Group is a remote, agile backend team that builds and maintains the frameworks, patterns, and tooling that enable GitLab teams to work confidently with data at scale across all application datastores. As part of the broader Data Engineering organization, we focus on data scalability, health, and developer enablement for both GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed deployments, collaborating closely with infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics stages to ensure data changes are safe, performant, and compatible across diverse environments. We are independent, self-organized contributors, and we collaborate asynchronously across regions. We are currently expanding our mission from proactively identifying and addressing saturation points in GitLab.com infrastructure to also delivering scalability features and data health initiatives to self-managed customers.
• How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees
• Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.

Technology in this role

• SQL: • Design, build, and maintain tooling such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks to proactively surface and address scalability and performance .
• Ruby on Rails: With the team's recent move into the Data Engineering organization, you'll also shape new scalability and data health features for self-managed customers, working hands-on with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in a fully remote, highly collaborative .
• Ruby: With the team's recent move into the Data Engineering organization, you'll also shape new scalability and data health features for self-managed customers, working hands-on with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in a fully remote, highly collaborative .
• PostgreSQL: With the team's recent move into the Data Engineering organization, you'll also shape new scalability and data health features for self-managed customers, working hands-on with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in a fully remote, highly collaborative .
• CAN: Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting .
• Rails: With the team's recent move into the Data Engineering organization, you'll also shape new scalability and data health features for self-managed customers, working hands-on with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in a fully remote, highly collaborative .

Benefits

• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan

About GitLab

The Platform Readiness team is part of GitLab Developer Experience, building internal developer tooling capability for platform readiness across GitLab's four deployment targets: Self-Managed, Dedicated, Dedicated for Government, and GitLab.com. We partner with platform teams, feature teams, and product management to ensure every feature is evaluated against platform readiness requirements before it ships.

Current challenges we're tackling:

Moving from manual coordination to embedded automation: Transitioning from manual, ad-hoc platform readiness assessments to automated, agentic evaluation while maintaining human oversight and trust

Building a structured, machine-readable requirements body: Evolving the platform requirements schema to capture the full scope of platform readiness concerns across all domains and platforms

Making platform readiness native to the tools feature teams already use: Enabling platform teams to contribute domain expertise and validation logic without requiring deep Platform Readiness infrastructure knowledge

Building the measurement systems to know we're working: Creating observability and evaluation frameworks that give us confidence in agentic-workflow decisions and surface failures early

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