Backend Engineer

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on GitLab’s External Agents team, you’ll design and build integrations that bring GitLab agents into tools such as Slack and connect external solutions such as Claude Code or Codex with GitLab. You’ll take end-to-end ownership of complex features, help shape architectural patterns for how GitLab exposes its AI functionality, and collaborate with engineers across the Agent Foundations stage and adjacent AI engineering teams. This is a high-visibility area at the intersection of GitLab’s core platform and AI strategy.

What you’ll do

• Develop, ship, and maintain secure, well-tested, and performant external agent integrations across the GitLab monolith backend.
• Collaborate with Product Management, user experience, frontend, backend, and AI specialists to refine requirements and deliver high-quality improvements iteratively.
• Design, implement, and review GraphQL and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and related backend logic, with clear contracts for frontend clients.
• Improve and extend automated testing, including RSpec and other frameworks, to strengthen quality, reliability, and developer feedback loops.
• Share standards, patterns, and lessons with other engineers to support responsible AI integration and evidence-based engineering across the team.
• Participate in Tier 2 on-call rotations, troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve observability and resiliency.
• Assess the competitive landscape and help GitLab build strong AI integrations as agentic technology evolves.

What you’ll bring

• Experience building and maintaining production applications with Ruby on Rails, including background jobs, APIs, and data models.
• Comfort working across the stack in a mature codebase.
• Proficiency in designing or extending REST or GraphQL APIs with attention to scalability, maintainability, and backward compatibility.
• Practical experience designing and shipping AI-powered backend features or integrations.
• Strong SQL skills and familiarity with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including efficient queries and data modeling.
• Experience identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks at the application and, where relevant, infrastructure layers.
• Openness to learning, collaborating in an asynchronous, distributed team, and applying transferable skills from related technologies or domains; familiarity with Python backends or Vue frontends is a plus.

About the team

External Agents is a functional team within the AI Catalog group. We will initially consist of three engineers across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) time zones, while the wider AI Catalog group includes more than eight engineers across Asia-Pacific (APAC), EMEA, and the Americas (AMER). Other teams in AI Catalog focus on agent creation and curation. Together, we partner with teams across AI engineering and GitLab to help the GitLab Duo Agent Platform become the backbone for AI features across the product.