Backend Engineer

An overview of this role

We're looking for a Backend Engineer to join our Repository Management team within GitLab's Source Code stage. You'll help customers configure repositories with confidence so their GitLab projects support the way their teams work. As artificial intelligence agents increasingly write and manage code alongside people, you'll build guardrails that make development safe and trustworthy. You'll turn complex policy and repository management needs into reliable backend solutions that support people and the agents working on their behalf.

You'll work in one of GitLab's oldest and most complex product areas, using Ruby and GraphQL to improve a critical system that serves GitLab.com, self-managed instances, and GitLab Dedicated. Source Code provides the interface layer, through Gitaly, to the Git repositories that account for a large portion of GitLab traffic. With support from experienced team members, you'll help maintain high reliability through performance and structured query language tuning, caching, rate limiting, testing, observability, and resiliency. You'll collaborate with product management, product design, testing, security, user experience research, technical writing, Gitaly, Code Review, and Source Code Experience to deliver reliable and performant systems.

Learn more about the Create:Source Code teams in the GitLab Handbook.

What you’ll do

• Develop secure, well-tested, performant features and improvements using Ruby and GraphQL.
• Work through complex requirements and legacy constraints to deliver clear solutions while protecting the reliability of this critical system.
• Contribute to backend services, application programming interfaces, data models, and business logic for repository management.
• Collaborate across functions and teams, both asynchronously and synchronously, involving domain experts and seeking guidance when needed.
• Use artificial intelligence agents for well-scoped work when they can speed up delivery without sacrificing quality, and critically review their output.
• Write maintainable code that follows GitLab's standards and apply feedback from code review.
• Help strengthen reliability by monitoring production health metrics, participating in Tier 2 on-call, troubleshooting incidents, contributing to root cause analysis, and improving observability and resiliency.
• Share knowledge through code review, technical documentation, and everyday collaboration while learning from others.

What you’ll bring

• Professional experience building backend web applications, services, or application programming interfaces, with experience using Ruby and GraphQL or the ability to learn them.
• An understanding of relational databases, structured query language, data modeling, caching, background processing, and backend performance practices.
• Experience contributing to policy, permissions, or rules-based features in web applications and helping make that complexity reliable and maintainable.
• Experience writing backend unit and integration tests, with familiarity with Git and collaborative code review processes.
• Experience using artificial intelligence coding tools or agents, with the ability to review their output and recognize when additional guidance is needed.
• Clear written and spoken English communication skills, including sharing useful status updates and collaborating in a remote, asynchronous environment.
• The ability to manage assigned priorities, work through ambiguity, take ownership of your work, and seek guidance for decisions that are difficult to reverse.

About the team

The functional team works across Europe and North America, supporting both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. It includes six engineers, and this role offers an opportunity to grow your backend skills, learn from experienced team members, and contribute to our technical direction. We work closely with Code Review and Gitaly, alongside sibling teams covering Repository Sync & Interop, Source Code Experience, and Repository Scale, Performance & Git Infrastructure. We're maturing GitLab's branch protection offering while maintaining availability, reliability, and stability through bug fixes and focused technical debt work. Our roadmap includes Branch Rules, Codeowners, merge strategy options, and artificial intelligence-powered repository management and configuration.

We welcome candidates with different levels and types of experience. Many successful candidates don't meet every requirement. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiting team to assess your application.