Senior Backend Engineer

Role Description

We're looking for an experienced Product Engineer who cares deeply about users and has full stack experience, with a current focus on backend. You'll spend as much time understanding what users need and shaping how features should work as you do building them. You'll work directly with the product manager, engage with users on our public issue tracker and support tickets, and collaborate with contributors.

You'll be deeply involved in the backend architecture that powers the work items platform. This system has to serve millions of work items in a single user's view across tens of thousands of groups and projects.

We provide access to Claude Code and other agentic tools and encourage responsible agentic development. We also build our own artificial intelligence (AI) features by integrating GitLab Duo with the work items platform, so experience developing AI features is a strong plus.

What you’ll do

• Collaborate closely with Product to shape requirements and break projects into shippable iterations.
• Work with other engineers to plan and complete the work.
• Design and implement backend features across the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and real-time subscriptions, with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and user impact.
• Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale by optimizing queries and writes, denormalizing and partitioning tables, and moving workloads to Elasticsearch or ClickHouse where appropriate.
• Contribute to real-time features that keep work item information current as it changes.
• Create proofs of concept for complex work.
• Ensure quality through extensive testing and safe rollouts behind feature flags.
• Mentor engineers and open source contributors through code reviews, pairing, feedback, issue preparation, and contribution reviews.
• Participate in on-call rotations to troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve observability.
• Improve the developer experience for yourself and your team, including test infrastructure, the review process, retrospectives, and how we work together.

What you’ll bring

• A strong product mindset. You care about what users are trying to do.
• Experience leading and supporting other engineers.
• Full stack experience with a current backend focus, including proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills and experience improving PostgreSQL performance at scale.
• Experience designing and evolving GraphQL and/or REST APIs.
• Experience improving large automated test suites.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.
• Experience integrating AI into development workflows or developing AI-powered features, or working with Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python, is a plus.

About the team

The Planning Views group is part of GitLab's Plan stage. We build the planning experience in GitLab. We're unifying the user experience across work item lists, agile boards, roadmaps, and grid views while building the work items platform underneath them. We're currently working on agile boards.

Our work serves every GitLab customer who plans and tracks work and provides a foundation for other Plan stage initiatives, such as Configurable Work Item Types.

We're a team of four engineers: one backend, two frontend, and one full stack. We're located in Australia, India, and Europe and work with a dedicated product manager and an engineering manager. We're asynchronous-first, working in two-week iterations with retrospectives and a weekly sync.

Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave