Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience 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 Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group, you’ll work cross-functionally to help us identify and improve the engineering experience across GitLab’s internal engineering teams. We’re at a pivotal time in transforming our testing approach and development experience to enable engineers to deliver high-quality code efficiently and with confidence.

Developer Experience currently has six, globally distributed teams of Backend Engineers and Software Engineers in Test. This role will work across the entire group to help us identify and remove the biggest points of friction that affect development at GitLab. Expect to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions and helping every team deliver. You’ll be instrumental in shaping our engineering culture across GitLab.

This is a highly visible role with strong company-wide support. You’ll be instrumental in shifting our culture and practices toward a cohesive Developer Experience Platform strategy—backed by buy-in and appetite for change.

In this role, you may lead projects such as:

Internal developer platform adoption: Build and evolve platform capabilities that make it easier for engineering teams to create, deploy, operate, and scale services on Kubernetes.

Kubernetes-based service onboarding: Define reusable service templates, deployment workflows, configuration patterns, and operational guardrails for teams adopting the platform.

Developer workflows and test environments: Build development, CI, and test environments that reflect production Kubernetes behavior — including third-party operators and the custom resources services depend on — sequencing CRD establishment, controller readiness, and dependent workloads so engineers get a working environment rather than a partially reconciled one, across both local and remote clusters.

Platform reliability and observability: Partner with infrastructure and service teams to improve rollout safety, troubleshooting, service health, resource management, and operational visibility across Kubernetes workloads.

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

• Set direction and deliver technical work for backend developer experience tooling.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, security and business stakeholders.
• Improve reliability, architecture, automation, observability and documentation.
• Mentor engineers and guide sustainable production practices.

Qualifications

• In this role, you may lead projects such as:
• Internal developer platform adoption: Build and evolve platform capabilities that make it easier for engineering teams to create, deploy, operate, and scale services on Kubernetes.
• Kubernetes-based service onboarding: Define reusable service templates, deployment workflows, configuration patterns, and operational guardrails for teams adopting the platform.
• Developer workflows and test environments: Build development, CI, and test environments that reflect production Kubernetes behavior — including third-party operators and the custom resources services depend on — sequencing CRD establishment, controller readiness, and dependent workloads so engineers get a working environment rather than a partially reconciled one, across both local and remote clusters.
• Platform reliability and observability: Partner with infrastructure and service teams to improve rollout safety, troubleshooting, service health, resource management, and operational visibility across Kubernetes workloads.
• Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes, including workloads, networking, configuration and secrets, identity, storage, observability, progressive delivery, and the custom resources and controllers that services depend on.
• Make environment bring-up and teardown deterministic — resolving readiness and ordering dependencies between CRDs, controllers, and the workloads that rely on them — so engineers get reproducible environments instead of intermittent failures.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and application teams to turn Kubernetes capabilities into simple, well-supported workflows rather than requiring every service team to become a Kubernetes expert.
• Establish engineering standards, documentation, automation, and feedback loops that improve adoption and reduce the time required to bring a service from development to production.
• Coach engineers through architectural decisions, incident follow-up, and production operations while maintaining a clear focus on sustainable team delivery.
• Represent the team with technical and organizational stakeholders, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and use adoption and reliability measures to guide prioritization.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence without authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, and product functions.
• Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and production operations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment.
• A product mindset with a passion for empowering developers through simple, reliable, and well-documented workflows.
• Alignment with GitLab values, especially collaboration, iteration, and transparency.

Technology in this role

• Kubernetes: In this role, you may lead projects such as: Internal developer platform adoption: Build and evolve platform capabilities that make it easier for engineering teams to create, deploy, operate, and scale services on .
• Go: Expect to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions and helping every team .
• Ruby: Expect to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions and helping every team .
• CI/CD: Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and production .
• CAN: Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting .

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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