Backend Engineer

An overview of this role

We're looking for an experienced Product Engineer who cares deeply about users and has full stack experience, with a current focus on backend. You'll spend as much time understanding what users need and shaping how features should work as you do building them. You'll work directly with the product manager, engage with users on our public issue tracker and support tickets, and collaborate with contributors.

You'll be deeply involved in the backend architecture that powers the work items platform. This system has to serve millions of work items in a single user's view across tens of thousands of groups and projects.

We provide access to Claude Code and other agentic tools and encourage responsible agentic development. We also build our own artificial intelligence (AI) features by integrating GitLab Duo with the work items platform, so experience developing AI features is a strong plus.

What you’ll do

• Collaborate closely with Product to shape requirements and break projects into shippable iterations. Work with other engineers to plan and complete the work.
• Design and implement backend features across the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and real-time subscriptions, with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and user impact.
• Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale by optimizing queries and writes, denormalizing and partitioning tables, and moving workloads to Elasticsearch or ClickHouse where appropriate. The work items framework serves as the foundation for some of the highest-traffic surfaces in GitLab.
• Contribute to real-time features that keep work item information current as it changes.
• Create proofs of concept for complex work. Ensure quality through extensive testing and safe rollouts behind feature flags.
• Mentor engineers and open source contributors through code reviews, pairing, feedback, issue preparation, and contribution reviews.
• Participate in on-call rotations to troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve observability.
• Improve the developer experience for yourself and your team, including test infrastructure, the review process, retrospectives, and how we work together.

What you’ll bring

• A strong product mindset. You care about what users are trying to do. You hold strong opinions from the user perspective, listen to peers, and negotiate trade-offs with product managers and users.
• Experience leading and supporting other engineers. You've driven projects involving several engineers over months. You care about your teammates' growth and give it your time through thoughtful code reviews, regular feedback, support for career development, hiring, and mentoring contributors.
• Full stack experience with a current backend focus, including proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails and experience maintaining backend features in a large, mature codebase.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills and experience improving PostgreSQL performance at scale, including query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, and partitioning.
• Experience designing and evolving GraphQL and/or REST APIs, with attention to scalability, backward compatibility, and clear contracts with frontend clients.
• Experience improving large automated test suites, with a focus on the performance and reliability of the tests themselves.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.
• Experience integrating AI into development workflows or developing AI-powered features, or working with Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python, is a plus.

About the team

The Planning Views group is part of GitLab's Plan stage. We build the planning experience in GitLab. We're unifying the user experience across work item lists, agile boards, roadmaps, and grid views while building the work items platform underneath them. We're currently working on agile boards. Our work serves every GitLab customer who plans and tracks work and provides a foundation for other Plan stage initiatives, such as Configurable Work Item Types.

We're a team of four engineers: one backend, two frontend, and one full stack. We're located in Australia, India, and Europe and work with a dedicated product manager and an engineering manager. We're asynchronous-first, working in two-week iterations with retrospectives and a weekly sync.