Backend Engineering

Backend Engineers at GitLab work on our product. This includes both the open source and enterprise editions, and the GitLab.com service.

Backend Engineering Roles at GitLab

Backend Engineers at GitLab work on our product. This includes both the open source version of GitLab, the enterprise editions, and the GitLab.com service as well. They work with peers on teams dedicated to areas of the product. They work together with product managers, designers, and frontend engineers to solve common goals.

Unless otherwise specified, all Backend Engineering roles at GitLab share the following requirements and responsibilities:

Requirements

  • Significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails or language required by the specialty
  • Professional experience with any other technologies that may be required by the specialty
  • Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment
  • Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions
  • Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
  • Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process
  • Demonstrated ability to onboard and integrate with an organization long-term
  • Positive and solution-oriented mindset
  • Effective communication skills: Regularly achieve consensus with peers, and clear status updates
  • An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility
  • Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.
  • Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational skills.
  • Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization
  • Share our values, and work in accordance with those values
  • Ability to thrive in a fully remote organization
  • Ability to use GitLab
  • Comfort and familiarity with our code review process

Nice-to-haves

  • Experience in a peak performance organization, preferably a tech startup
  • Experience with the GitLab product as a user or contributor
  • Product company experience
  • Experience working with a remote team
  • Enterprise software company experience
  • Developer platform/tool industry experience
  • Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team
  • Computer science education or equivalent experience
  • Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools

Responsibilities

  • Develop features and improvements to the GitLab product in a secure, well-tested, and performant way
  • Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders within Engineering (Frontend, UX, etc.) to maintain a high bar for quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment
  • Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance
  • Solve technical problems of moderate scope and complexity.
  • Craft code that meets our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment.
  • Conduct Code Review within our Code Review Guidelines and ensure community contributions receive a swift response.
  • Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team (“technical debt”), propose and implement solutions
  • Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around specific projects and community contributions.
  • Confidently ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.
  • Participate in Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday and weekend and occasional night on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

Professional Experience

At GitLab, due to the pace we’re moving, people joining our team will be expected to have significant professional experience in the primary programming language of the specialty that they’ll be joining. Because the majority of our codebase is written in Ruby, even in specialized roles, a knowledge of Ruby and Ruby on Rails or a desire to learn and contribute is necessary.

For context, see this merge request with some history on this policy.


Primary programming language

Some specialties within GitLab are using primary programming languages other than Ruby. These programming languages are defined as being primary in terms of an engineer’s experience and what they’ll be writing day to day. The expectation from the specialty is that engineers will have extensive experience in this primary programming language as well as some level of understanding of Ruby and, Ruby on Rails.

Backend Engineer Performance Indicators

Backend Engineers have the following job-family performance indicators.

Engineering Managers have the following job-family performance indicators. Performance indicators for a Manager role usually apply to the team, meaning the manager and their direct reports.

Job Grades

Read more about GitLab Job Grades.

Associate Backend Engineer

The Associate level in the Engineering Division is a grade 5.

Intermediate Backend Engineer

Job Grade

The Intermediate Backend Engineer is a grade 6.

Senior Backend Engineer

The Senior Backend Engineer role extends the Backend Engineer role.

Job Grade

The Senior Backend Engineer is a grade 7.

Responsibilities

  • Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance that have particular impact across your team.
  • Solve technical problems of high scope and complexity.
  • Exert influence on the overall objectives and long-range goals of your team.
  • Experience with performance and optimization problems, particularly at large scale, and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
  • Help to define and improve our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.
  • Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around broader initiatives, specific projects, and community contributions.
  • Provide mentorship for Junior and Intermediate Engineers on your team to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and remove blockers to their autonomy.
  • Confidently ship moderately sized features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.
  • Improves the engineering projects at GitLab via the maintainer program at own comfortable pace, while striving to become a project maintainer.

A Senior Backend Engineer may want to pursue the engineering management track at this point as a manager of people or a higher level individual contributor. See Engineering Career Development for more detail.

Note: Staff and above positions at GitLab are more of a role than just a “level”. We prefer to bring people in as Senior and let the team elevate them to Staff due to an outstanding work history within GitLab.


Staff Backend Engineer

The Staff Backend Engineer role extends the Senior Backend Engineer role as an individual contributor.

Job Grade

The Staff Backend Engineer is a grade 8.

Responsibilities

  • Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance that have particular impact across your team and others.
  • Solve technical problems of the highest scope and complexity for your team.
  • Exert significant influence on the overall objectives and long-range goals of your team.
  • Shepherd the definition and improvement of our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.
  • Drive innovation on the team with a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of immense complexity and scope.
  • Actively seek out difficult impediments to our efficiency as a team (“technical debt”), propose and implement solutions that will enable the entire team to iterate faster
  • Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around broad initiatives, specific projects, and community contributions. Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your team.
  • Provide mentorship for all Engineers on your team to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and remove blockers to their autonomy.
  • Confidently ship large features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.

Backend Engineering Manager

The Backend Engineering Manager specializes in Backend Engineering Management as a manager of people. Engineering Managers at GitLab see their team as their product. While they are technically credible and know the details of what engineers work on, their time is spent safeguarding their team’s health, hiring a world-class team, and putting them in the best position to succeed. They own the delivery of product commitments and are always looking to improve productivity. They must also coordinate across departments to accomplish collaborative goals.

Job Grade

The Backend Engineering Manager role is a grade 8.

Responsibilities

  • Help your engineers grow their skills and experience
  • Author project plans for epics
  • Run agile project management processes
  • Conduct code reviews, and make technical contributions to product architecture as well as getting involved in solving bugs and delivering small features
  • Actively seek and hire globally-distributed talent
  • Conduct managerial interviews for candidates, and train the team to do technical interviews
  • Contribute to the sense of psychological safety on your team
  • Generate and implement process improvements
  • Hold regular 1:1’s with all members of their team
  • Give regular and clear feedback around the individual’s performance
  • Foster technical decision making on the team, but make final decisions when necessary
  • Draft quarterly OKRs and Engineering KPIs
  • Improve product quality, security, and performance

Requirements

  • Exquisite brokering skills: regularly achieve consensus amongst departments
  • 5 years or more experience
  • 2 years or more experience in a leadership role with current technical experience
  • In-depth experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, and/or Git, in addition to any experience required by the position’s specialty
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills
  • You share our values, and work in accordance with those values
  • Ability to use GitLab

Nice-to-have Requirement

  • Experience in a peak performance organization
  • Deep Ruby on Rails experience
  • Golang experience
  • Product company experience
  • Startup experience
  • Enterprise software company experience
  • Computer science education or equivalent experience
  • Passionate about open source and developer tools

Career Ladder

For more details on the engineering career ladders, please review the engineering career development handbook page.

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can generally expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Note that as candidates indicate preference or aptitude for one or more specialties, the hiring process will be adjusted to suit. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find their job title on our team page.

For Individual Contributors:

  • Candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Technical Recruiters
  • Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 90 minute technical interview with one of our Backend Engineers
  • Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute interview with one of our Backend Engineering Managers
  • Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute interview with our Director of Engineering
  • Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer. Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

For Managers:

  • Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Technical Recruiters
  • Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute first interview with a Director of Engineering
  • Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute second peer interview with an Engineering Manager
  • Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute third interview with another member of the Engineering team
  • Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fourth interview with a member of the Product team
  • Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fifth interview with our VP of Engineering
  • Finally, candidates may be asked to schedule a 50 minute final interview with our CEO
  • Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email

Specialties

Distribution:Build

The Build team closely partners with our greater engineering organization to build and distribute GitLab services. The Build team is tasked with ensuring the components that make up GitLab are up to date, license compliant, and available for our users’ platforms and architectures. This group manages the build pipelines, researches support for new services, platforms, and architectures, as well as maintains existing ones. We strive to respond efficiently to build failures, security results, and dependency changes in order to ensure a safe reliable product for our users.

Distribution Build engineering regularly interfaces with broader development teams in supporting newly created features. Notably, the Distribution Deploy team is the Build team’s biggest internal collaborator, so there is significant team interdependency. The Distribution Build team is involved with diverse projects and tasks that include assisting community packaging efforts.

Requirements

  • Experience with building Docker images and docker build tooling
  • Extensive Linux experience, comfortable between Debian and RHEL based systems
  • Experience building and packaging archives such as .deb and .rpm
  • Familiar with building and packaging cloud native applications
  • Familiar with multi-stage build systems
  • Experience using Continuous Integration systems (e.g., GitLab CI, Jenkins, Travis).

Responsibilities

  • Research for the support of new clouds, platforms, architecture, and components
  • Access controls, permissions, and CVE patches
  • Dependency updates
  • License management
  • Submissions to Partners for validations/certifications
  • The install, update, and upgrade pages
  • Build and own the infrastructure used for creating the various installation methods
  • Maintaining infrastructure used in Distribution

Distribution:Deploy

The Deploy team closely partners with our greater engineering organization to configure and automate GitLab deployments. The Deploy team is tasked with delivering an intuitive, clear, and frictionless installation experience, followed by smooth, seamless upgrade and maintenance processes for deployments of any scale. We strive to deliver ongoing operational behaviors for scaling, little to zero downtime upgrades, and highly reliable experiences for not only instance administrators but their users.

Distribution Deploy engineering regularly interfaces with broader development teams in supporting newly created features. Notably, our infrastructure team is the deploy team’s biggest internal customer, so there is significant team interdependency. The Distribution Deploy team is involved with diverse projects and tasks that include assisting community packaging efforts.

Requirements

  • Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production use cases
  • Chef experience (writing complex cookbooks from scratch, custom providers, custom resources, etc.)
  • Extensive Linux experience, comfortable between Debian and RHEL based systems
  • Experience running applications at scale in Kubernetes
  • Experience transforming existing applications to cloud native oriented applications

Responsibilities

  • Initial installation and composability for self-managed installations and GitLab.com
  • Upgrades / Downgrades
  • Scaling deployments
  • Migration between platforms or providers
  • Data lifecycle management
  • Secure configuration & communication
  • Research of clouds and platforms for integration to existing tools

Package

Package engineers are focused on creating the binary repository management system that will extend our Continuous Integration (CI) functionality to allow access and management of artifacts manipulated by projects.

By extending the current CI artifacts system, the Package team will expose GitLab as a package repository allowing access to the most common package managers, e.g. Maven and APT and similar. Additionally, the Package team is improving the Container Registry and is responsible for items listed under Package product category.

Responsibilities

  • Develop the architecture by extending existing features
  • Work with the Distribution team on replacing their current delivery system
  • Create and maintain observability of the newly defined features
  • Work with customers on defining their needs to replace existing package repository solutions

Govern

Focus on security protection features for GitLab (including policy, vulnerability, dependency, and compliance management). This role will report to and collaborate directly with a Govern Engineering Manager.

Requirements

  • Strong engineer with Go and Ruby experience.
  • Passion for security.
  • Understanding of all levels of OSI network model and common network protocols.
  • Understanding of infrastructure & application deployment models (Kubernetes, Docker, AWS/GCP/Azure).
  • Understanding of detecting and preventing attacks at the network, container, operating system, and application level.
  • Understanding of vulnerability lifecycle (including CVE).
  • A passion for learning new languages & technologies.
  • Experience with open source security tools (such as Kali, ModSecurity, Wireshark, Falco, etc).
  • Experience in using GitLab and GitLab CI.

Responsibilities

  • Develop security components from proposal to polished end result.
  • Integrating 3rd party security tools into production environments deployed by GitLab.

Secure

Focus on security features for GitLab. This role will specifically focus on security; if you want to work with Ruby on Rails and not security, please apply to our Backend Engineer role instead. This role will report to and collaborate directly with the Secure Engineering Manager.

Requirements

  • Strong Go and/or Ruby engineer with security expertise or proven security interest.
  • Passion and interest toward security (scanning, dependencies, etc.).
  • Experience in using GitLab and GitLab CI.

Responsibilities

  • Develop security tools from proposal to polished end result.
  • Integrating 3rd party security tools into GitLab.
  • Complete our internal Advisories Database.
  • Manage metadata related to dependencies.
  • Key aspects of this role are focused on security tools and features.
  • The complexity of this role will increase over time.
  • If you are willing to stick to working on these features for at least a year, then this role is for you.

Configuration

The configuration team works on GitLab’s Application Control Panel, Infrastructure Configuration features, our ChatOps product, Feature flags, and our entire Auto DevOps feature set. It is part of our collection of Ops Backend teams.

Requirements

  • Experienced engineer who is capable of leading and growing a team of senior engineers.
  • For this position, a significant amount of experience with Ruby is a strict requirement. Experience with Go is a plus as we expect that you will likely work on Go during your journey at GitLab.
  • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes platform development.
  • Experience or interest in functions-as-a-service.

Responsibilities

  • Implement and improve upon our constellation of configuration feature set.
  • Work with the PM team to execute on the roadmap.
  • Ensure we deliver on our commitments to the market by communicating clearly with stakeholders.
  • Implement the appropriate monitoring and alerting on new and existing features owned by the team.
  • Help others adopt and use the configuration features.

Verify

Verify backend engineers are primarily focused on improving the Continuous Integration (CI) experience. Verify Engineers should always have three goals in mind:

  1. Provide value to the user and communicate such with the product manager and engineering manager,
  2. Introduce features that work at scale and in untrusting environments,
  3. Always focus on defining and shipping the Minimal Viable Change.

Requirements

  • Experience with development tooling
  • Experience designing and building fault-tolerant systems or systems development
  • Experience building and scaling highly-available systems
  • In-depth experience with Ruby on Rails
  • Experience with distributed systems (nice-to-have)

Responsibilities

  • Work with the Product Manager and Engineering Manager to carefully assess technical feasibility of feature requests
  • Deliver proof-of-concept proposals to help guide technical discussions
  • Identify ways to deliver complex technical projects in an iterative fashion
  • Take ownership of what we build, focusing on stability and availability.

CI/CD

CI/CD Backend Engineers are primarily tasked with improving the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) functionality in GitLab. Engineers should be willing to learn Kubernetes and Container Technology. CI/CD Engineers should always have three goals in mind:

  1. Provide value to the user and communicate such with product managers,
  2. Introduce features that work at scale and in untrusting environments,
  3. Always focus on defining and shipping the Minimal Viable Change.

We, as a team, cover end-to-end integration of CI/CD in GitLab, with components being written in Rails and Go. We work on a scale of processing a few million of CI/CD jobs on GitLab.com monthly. CI/CD engineering is interlaced with a number of teams across GitLab. We build new features by following our direction. Currently, we focus on providing a deep integration of Kubernetes with GitLab:

  1. by automating application testing and deployment through Auto DevOps,
  2. by managing GitLab Runners on top of Kubernetes,
  3. by working with other teams that provide facilities to monitor all running applications,
  4. in the future implement A-B testing, feature flags, etc.

Additionally, we also focus on improving the efficiency, performance, and scalability of all aspects of CI/CD:

  1. Improve performance of developer workflows, e.g. faster CI testing, by improving parallelization,
  2. Improve performance of implementation, ex.:by allowing us to run 10-100x more in one year,
  3. Identify and add features needed by us, ex.:to allow us to test more reliably and ship faster.

The CI/CD Engineering Manager also does weekly stand-up with a team and product managers to talk about plan for the work in the upcoming week and coordinates a deployment of CI/CD related services with infrastructure team.

Requirements

  • Go developer with a lot of Kubernetes production experience is a plus

Geo

GitLab Geo is an enterprise product feature, built to help speed up the development of distributed teams by providing one or more read-only mirrors of a primary GitLab instance. This mirror (a Geo secondary node) reduces the time to clone or fetch large repositories and projects, or can be part of a Disaster Recovery solution.

Responsibilties

  • Work with the Product Manager to carefully assess technical feasibility of feature requests
  • Deliver proof-of-concept proposals to help guide technical discussions
  • Identify ways to deliver complex technical projects in an iterative fashion
  • Take ownership of feature implementation
  • Respond quickly to customer requests for support

Requirements

  • Experience designing and building fault-tolerant, distributed systems
  • Experience building and scaling highly-available systems
  • Experience with queueing and messaging systems
  • In-depth experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, and/or Git
  • Experience with provisioning tools is beneficial but not essential

Growth

Growth Engineers work with a cross-functional team to influence the growth of GitLab as a business. In helping us iterate and learn rapidly, these engineers enable us to more effectively meet the needs of potential users.

Requirements

  • Strong self-direction (this team is being bootstrapped)
  • Experience with A/B, multivariate, or other data-driven methods of testing
  • Comfort multitasking in a highly iterative environment

Engineering Productivity

Engineering Productivity Engineers are full-stack engineers primarily tasked with improving the productivity of the GitLab developers (from both GitLab Inc and the rest of the community), and making the GitLab project maintainable in the long-term.

Responsibilities

  • Build automated measurements and dashboards to gain insights into the productivity of the Engineering organization to identify opportunities for improvement.
  • Increase contributor and developer productivity by making measurement-driven improvements to the development tools / workflow / processes, then monitor the results, and iterate.
  • Dogfood GitLab product features to improve developer workflow and provide feedback to product teams.
  • Participate in activities related to Engineering throughput and Quality KPIs
  • Develop automated processes for improving label classification hygiene in support of product and engineering workflows.
  • Increase efficiency for wider GitLab Community contributions
  • Enhance and add new features to the GitLab product to improve engineer productivity

Requirements

  • Experience developing in Ruby (this is a strict requirement).
  • Experience in with test automation frameworks for both front-end and back-end testing.
  • Experience in designing and developing tools and solutions used across teams.
  • Development experience in object-oriented programming languages and patterns.
  • Excellent oral and written communication skills.
  • Experience with a front-end charting/visualization library.
  • Experience using test automation tools. (Selenium, Capybara, Watir).
  • Experience using Continuous Integration systems (e.g., GitLab CI, Jenkins, Travis).
  • Experience using Docker and containerized architectures (e.g. Kubernetes).

See the description of the Engineering Productivity team for more details. The position also involves working with the community as Merge Request Coach, and working together with our Backend Engineers to respond and address issues from the community.

Engineering Productivity Performance Indicators

Engineering Productivity Engineers have the following job-family performance indicators.

Hiring Process

  1. 30 minute screening call with one of our Technical Recruiters.
  2. 60 minute behavioral interview with the Engineering Manager, Engineering Productivity.
  3. 50 minute behavioral interview with two Quality team members with at least 1 Backend Engineer, Engineering Productivity
  4. 90 minute Ruby-based technical interview.
  5. 50 minute behavioral interview with the VP of Quality.

Application Performance

The Application Performance team works to improve availability, reliability, and performance of the application. We analyze the behavior, recognize bottlenecks, and propose changes. We work to make GitLab a responsive and performant DevOps platform, which offers a great user experience at any scale.

Responsibilities

  • Identify, troubleshoot, improve and manage memory-intensive aspects of the GitLab application.
  • Explore alternatives outside of the GitLab application for reducing memory consumption through contributions to, e.g., Rails, Ruby, Puma, or other key third-party components.
  • Define and help implement best practices for creating efficient and performant code.
  • Setting standards that changes are not affecting memory utilization and can be validated.
  • Partner with the Quality team to maintain effective performance reporting and monitoring through instrumentation and testing.

Requirements

An ideal engineer candidate -

  • Expert of Ruby on Rails.
  • Experience of performance tuning and/or architecture, Example.
  • Experience of memory leak troubleshooting, Example 1, Example 2.

Alternatively, some of the following qualifications, may not necessarily be all -

  1. Must be proficient in one or more of the following in preference order
  2. Ruby.
  3. Go.
  4. Similar OOP languages (e.g. Python, C++, Java, C#, etc.).
  5. AND/OR proficient in one or more of the following
  6. Proven record of building scalable solutions.
  7. Top notch understanding of DB principles and optimization mechanisms.
  8. Familiar with a framework similar to the concepts of Rails (e.g. CakePHP, Ember, Node.js, Angular, J2EE, etc.) - For reference and apply with due diligence.
  9. High-level principles: has knowledge of existing perf testing tools and test automation with some Ruby.
  10. Low-level principles: Understands internals, how memory works, garbage collection. Sorting algorithms.
  11. Nice to have
  12. Tuning up performance from architecture/design perspective.
  13. Troubleshooting memory leaks (any language).
  14. Optimizing full stack implementation, e.g. I/O, caching.
  15. Good knowledge of performance testing.
  16. Strong problem analysis and solving skills, methodological in problem solving.
  17. Must be a proven fast-learner and self-starter.

Ecosystem

The Ecosystem team is responsible for seamless integration between GitLab and 3rd party products as well as making GitLab products available on cloud service providers’ marketplaces such as AWS. The team plays a critical role in developing APIs and SDK and expanding GitLab market opportunities.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain APIs, Webhooks, and SDK of GitLab products.
  • Design, build, and maintain solutions to integrate to partner and 3rd party platforms.
  • Design, build, and maintain solutions for integrating with cloud service provider marketplaces, such as AWS.
  • Develop documentation and instructions of how to work with GitLab SDK & APIs.

Requirements

  • Previous experience developing REST and/or GraphQL APIs using a variety of technologies.
  • Previous experience working with Open API standards such as Swagger.
  • Proficient with Ruby.
  • Proficient or fluent with one or more of other common languages: Go, Python, Java, Node, JavaScript, etc.
  • Familiar with full web technology stack (e.g. HTTP, cookies, asset loading, caching).

Cluster

Gitaly is the Git data storage tier of GitLab, providing a reliable, secure and fast distributed Git data store over gRPC. For more information about Gitaly, see the team’s Direction page. This position reports to the Gitaly lead.

Gitaly’s high-availability storage requires developers who understand distributed storage systems, their management, observability and availability. Cluster team contributes features, fixes bugs and improves performance of this software stack.

Responsibilities

  • Participate in architectural discussions and decisions surrounding Gitaly.
  • Design RPC interfaces for the Gitaly service.
  • Scope, estimate and describe tasks to reach the team’s goals.
  • Develop Gitaly in accordance with the product’s goals.
  • Instrument, monitor and profile Gitaly in the production environment.
  • Build dashboards and alerts to monitor the health of your services.
  • Conduct acceptance testing of the features you’ve built.
  • Educate all team members on best practices relating to high availability.

Requirements

  • Mandatory: proven professional experience building, debugging, optimising software in large-scale, high-volume environments.
  • Mandatory: proven professional experience writing and testing high-quality code.
  • Mandatory: a good understanding of building instrumented, observable software systems.
  • Highly desirable: proven professional experience writing and testing quality code in Go.
  • Highly desirable: a good understanding of git’s internal data structures or experience running git servers.
  • Highly desirable: experience with gRPC.
  • Highly desirable: willingness to learn Ruby.
  • Highly desirable: experience running highly-available systems in production environments.

Git

Gitaly is the Git data storage tier of GitLab, providing a reliable, secure and fast distributed Git data store over gRPC. For more information about Gitaly, see the team’s Direction page. This position reports to the Git team lead.

Gitaly uses the open-source Git product under the hood to implement the business logic for repository access. Git team contributes features, fixes bugs and improves performance of upstream Git in accordance with product direction for both Git and GitLab/Gitaly.

Responsibilities

  • Participate in architectural discussions and decisions surrounding Git and Gitaly.
  • Participate in the Git community, connect and bridge discussions in the opensource community with GitLab.
  • Scope, estimate and describe tasks to reach the team’s goals.
  • Develop Git in accordance with both the team’s and the community’s goals.
  • Adapt Gitaly to make best use of Git, including integrating new features.
  • Conduct acceptance testing of the features you’ve built and integrated.
  • Be a good citizen of the open-source community.

Requirements

  • Mandatory: a good understanding of building instrumented, observable software systems.
  • Mandatory: a good understanding of git’s code and data structures or experience running git servers.
  • Mandatory: proven professional experience writing and testing quality code in C.
  • Mandatory: accepted contributions to the Git project.
  • Highly desirable: proven professional experience writing and testing quality code in Go.
  • Highly desirable: experience with Linux internals (processes, memory management, I/O, filesystems).
  • Highly desirable: experience building, debugging, optimising software in large-scale, high-volume environments.
  • Highly desirable: experience running highly-available systems in production environments.

Database

A database specialist is an engineer that focuses on database related changes and improvements. You will spend the majority of your time making application changes to improve database performance, availability, and reliability.

Unlike the Database Engineer position the database specialist title has a balance of application development and knowledge of PostgreSQL. As such Ruby knowledge is absolutely required and deep PostgreSQL knowledge is equally important.

Requirements

  • Significant professional software engineering experience with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL in large production environments
  • Demonstrated experience with Ruby on Rails or other Ruby frameworks such as Sinatra or Hanami
  • Expert-level understanding of relational databases, SQL and query optimization techniques and demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent performance problems
  • Significant experience working in a distributed production environment

Infrastructure

Infrastructure specialists work alongside DBREs and SREs and are experienced Ruby/GoLang developers who work in the product with a focus on reliability, observability, performance and scalability at the application level, as well as on resource optimization from an Infrastructure perspective and on operationally relevant features.

Requirements

  • Strong Ruby and Golang experience required
  • Strong experience with profiling and metrics analysis
  • Strong experience with observability tools, including metrics (Prometheus is a plus), structured logging and distributed tracing
  • Desirable: DevOps experience, working with Linux, GCP/AWS, Chef/Ansible, or similar products
  • ActiveRecord and SQL expertise

Responsibilities

  • Fix relevant Infrastructure-related issues from the issue tracker
  • Develop operations-related features
  • Focus on reliability, performance and scalability, as well as resource optimization

Delivery

Delivery specialist is an engineer that focuses on improving the engineering release workflows, creates new tools, improves release process and works closely with the whole Engineering team to ensure that every GitLab release reaches the public in time.

Responsibilities

  • Guarantees the GitLab Release Process
  • Creates new tools to automate the release process
  • Builds new GitLab release features to replace existing custom tooling
  • Works with individual teams on defining and implementing solutions that will help them release quicker
  • Creates frameworks that allow engineers to write code that scales with demand
  • Helps teams instrument their code and helps recognize parts of code that could benefit from increased observability
  • Works closely with peer Infrastructure teams to control the impact of application code running in user facing products
  • Helps communicate the release schedule clearly with others
  • Develop monitoring and alerting to measure release process velocity
  • Identify process bottlenecks and introduce optimizations

Scalability

The Scalability team is responsible for optimising GitLab.com performance through improving the reliability, availability and performance of individual GitLab services and the application as a whole.

Responsibilities

  • Create, analyze, and maintain GitLab.com Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
  • Resolve problems that contribute to missed SLOs.
  • Find, define, and resolve application bottlenecks as observed on GitLab.com.
  • Work closely with embedded Site Reliability Engineers to prepare production changes.

Requirements

Candidate should ideally be:

  • Methodical when troubleshooting and solving problems.
  • Experienced in working on large scale systems.
  • Experienced in application and systems observability.
  • Have working knowledge of one or more of the services used to deliver GitLab.com.

Other qualifications include:

  • Language expertise. Application contributions are expected in Ruby and the ability to contribute in Go is helpful.
  • Knowledge of profiling, and performance testing.
  • Understanding of basic database principles and optimisation mechanisms.

Elasticsearch engineers are focused on delivering a first class global search experience throughout GitLab products. They are experienced Ruby/GoLang developers who focus on implementing core Elasticsearch functions while advising other development teams on best practices (e.g. indexing).

Requirements

  • Elasticsearch experience - modeling, processing, nodes and index management
  • Proficient in Go (Golang) and/or Ruby, Ruby on Rails
  • Desirable: DevOps experience, working with Linux, GCP/AWS, Chef/Ansible, or similar products
  • Desirable: PostgreSQL experience

Responsibilities

  • Building a first class global search implementation
  • Improve and implement our indexing strategies
  • Own architecture, performance and scaling of the Elasticsearch solution
  • Build responsive and scalable services and APIs in Go
  • Self-managed installation mechanisms

 


About GitLab

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.

We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.

Top 10 Reasons to Work for GitLab:

  1. Mission: Everyone can contribute
  2. Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
  3. Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
  4. Transparency: Over 2,000 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
  5. Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
  6. Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity, Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
  7. Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
  8. Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
  9. Work/Life Harmony: Flexible workday, Family and Friends days
  10. Remote Done Right: One of the world's largest all-remote companies, prolific inventor of remote best practices

See our culture page for more!

Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto and guides.