Senior Software Engineer (Ruby)

Responsibilities

• Design and ship authorization changes in GitLab’s Ruby on Rails monolith.
• Own workstreams from problem definition through feature-flagged rollout, dual-run verification, and cleanup.
• Build and extend fine-grained permissions for tokens and roles and maintain the permission catalog.
• Extend and harden authorization enforcement across GraphQL and REST APIs.
• Refactor policy code so it can be evaluated by both the monolith and the new authorization engine without changing existing behavior.
• Improve the reliability, performance, and security posture of authorization systems.
• Partner with authentication, platform, AI, and modular-service teams on shared authorization interfaces.
• Drive technical decisions through design documents, architecture decision records, and code review in an asynchronous organization.

Requirements

• Significant experience building and operating production Ruby on Rails applications.
• Experience designing or implementing authorization systems, including role-based access control and fine-grained permissions.
• A security mindset with the ability to assess the blast radius of permission bugs.
• Comfort making careful incremental changes to large, long-lived codebases, including feature-flagged rollouts and behavior-preserving migrations.
• Working knowledge of GraphQL and API authorization patterns.
• Understanding of performance considerations at scale, including repeated permission checks per request.
• Strong written communication for document- and merge-request-driven collaboration.
• Helpful but not required: Rust, gRPC or Protocol Buffers, Cedar or other policy languages, Zanzibar-style authorization systems, Go, or service-oriented architecture.
• Transferable experience from identity, policy engines, or platform security is welcome.

Benefits

• Health, financial, and well-being benefits.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Team Member Resource Groups.
• Equity compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Growth and Development Fund.
• Parental leave.
• Fully remote work arrangement with country-specific eligibility requirements.