Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

About the Position

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.

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team responsible for developer tooling and internal platform capabilities used by engineering teams to build and operate services.
• Set and execute a roadmap for Kubernetes-based developer workflows, balancing developer experience, platform reliability, security, and operational efficiency.
• Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes.
• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• Deep experience building developer tooling, DevEx platforms, testing frameworks, or CI/CD systems at scale.
• Strong hands-on Go experience designing, implementing, testing, and operating production-quality services, command-line tools, automation, or platform tooling. Experience contributing to Ruby-based systems is also valuable for this role.
• Practical Kubernetes experience building or operating production workloads and platform capabilities, including deployments, services, networking, configuration and secrets, observability, resource management, and troubleshooting.
• Experience designing scalable solutions that improve engineering productivity, test reliability, development environments, or delivery workflows across multiple teams.
• 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.

We Offer

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

About the Company

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.

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United States Salary Range

$131,600 - $282,000 USD