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 towards common goals.
The Staff Backend Engineer is a grade 8.
Read more about what a specialty is at GitLab here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
Additionally, we also focus on improving the efficiency, performance, and scalability of all aspects of CI/CD:
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.
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.
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.
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.
See the description of the Quality 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.
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.
An ideal engineer candidate -
Alternatively, some of the following qualifications, may not necessarily be all -
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.
Gitaly is a service that handles git and other filesystem operations for GitLab instances, and aims to improve reliability and performance while scaling to meet the needs of installations with thousands of concurrent users, including our site GitLab.com. This position reports to the Gitaly Lead.
Meltano is an early stage project at GitLab focused on delivering an open source framework for analytics, business intelligence, and data science. It leverages version control, data science tools, CI, CD, Kubernetes, and review apps.
A Meltano Engineer will be tasked with executing on the vision of the Meltano project, to bring the product to market.
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.
Gitter specialists are full-stack JavaScript developers who are able to write JavaScript code that is shared between multiple environments. Gitter uses a JavaScript stack running Node.js on the server, and bundled with webpack on the client. The iOS, Android, macOS (Cocoa) and Linux/Windows (NW.js) clients reuse much of the same codebase but also require some knowledge of Objective-C, Swift and Java. Gitter uses MongoDB, Redis, and Elasticsearch for backend storage.
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.
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.
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.
Candidate should ideally be:
Other qualifications include:
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).
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.
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:
See our culture page for more!
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