Backend Engineer

An overview of this role

We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for GitLab's Portfolio Experience team. You'll be an experienced product engineer who incorporates user needs into feature decisions and brings full stack experience, with a current focus on backend. You'll spend as much time understanding user needs and shaping how features should work as you do building them, working directly with product, users, and open source contributors.

You'll help evolve the backend architecture that powers the work items platform, which must serve millions of work items in a single user's view across tens of thousands of groups and projects.

What you’ll do

• Collaborate with product and other engineers to shape requirements, understand user needs, and break complex projects into shippable iterations.
• Design and implement backend and real-time features in the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and RESTful APIs and subscriptions, with a focus on performance, reliability, and user impact.
• Build and evolve portfolio planning capabilities, including work item hierarchy, status rollup, and capacity planning.
• Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, partitioning, and moving suitable workloads to Elasticsearch or ClickHouse.
• Create proofs of concept for complex work, maintain extensive automated test coverage, and support safe rollouts with feature flags and strong observability.
• Mentor engineers and open source contributors through code reviews, pairing, regular feedback, contributor issues, and hackathons.
• Participate in on-call rotations, troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve the team's development and review processes.

What you’ll bring

• Experience representing the user perspective while working through trade-offs with product managers, engineers, and users.
• Experience leading projects involving several engineers over multiple months and supporting others through thoughtful code reviews, feedback, hiring, career development, and mentoring.
• Full stack experience with a current backend focus, including proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails and an understanding of how complex modern frontends work.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills and experience improving database performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, and partitioning.
• Experience designing and evolving GraphQL and/or RESTful APIs with attention to scalability, backward compatibility, and clear contracts with frontend clients.
• Experience improving large automated test suites, including the performance and reliability of the tests themselves.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.
• Experience integrating artificial intelligence into development workflows. Experience building artificial intelligence-powered features or working with Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python is a plus.

We welcome candidates with different backgrounds and transferable skills. If you're excited about this role but don't meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply.

About the team

We are a team of 4 - 2x Backend Engineers, 2x Frontend Engineers located across Europe and Canada. We own the work item hierarchy, including Epic, Issue, and Task relationships, and top-down planning capabilities such as status rollup and capacity planning. We work async-first in two-week iterations, with retrospectives and a weekly sync.