Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

About the role

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

As a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group, you’ll work cross-functionally to help us identify and improve the engineering experience across GitLab’s internal engineering teams. We’re at a pivotal time in transforming our testing approach and development experience to enable engineers to deliver high-quality code efficiently and with confidence. Developer Experience currently has six, globally distributed teams of Backend Engineers and Software Engineers in Test. This role will work across the entire group to help us identify and remove the biggest points of friction that affect development at GitLab. Expect to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions and helping every team deliver. You’ll be instrumental in shaping our engineering culture across GitLab. This is a highly visible role with strong company-wide support. You’ll be instrumental in shifting our culture and practices toward a cohesive Developer Experience Platform strategy—backed by buy-in and appetite for change.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team responsible for developer tooling and internal platform capabilities used by engineering teams to build and operate services.
• Set and execute a roadmap for Kubernetes-based developer workflows, balancing developer experience, platform reliability, security, and operational efficiency.
• Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes, including workloads, networking, configuration and secrets, identity, storage, observability, and progressive delivery.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and application teams to turn Kubernetes capabilities into simple, well-supported workflows rather than requiring every service team to become a Kubernetes expert.
• Establish engineering standards, documentation, automation, and feedback loops that improve adoption and reduce the time required to bring a service from development to production.
• Coach engineers through architectural decisions, incident follow-up, and production operations while maintaining a clear focus on sustainable team delivery.
• Represent the team with technical and organizational stakeholders, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and use adoption and reliability measures to guide prioritization.

Requirements

• Deep experience building developer tooling, DevEx platforms, testing frameworks, or CI/CD systems at scale.
• Strong hands-on Go experience designing, implementing, testing, and operating production-quality services, command-line tools, automation, or platform tooling.
• Experience contributing to Ruby-based systems is also valuable for this role.
• Practical Kubernetes experience building or operating production workloads and platform capabilities, including deployments, services, networking, configuration and secrets, observability, resource management, and troubleshooting.
• Experience designing scalable solutions that improve engineering productivity, test reliability, development environments, or delivery workflows across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence without authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, and product functions.
• Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and production operations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment.
• A product mindset with a passion for empowering developers through simple, reliable, and well-documented workflows.
• Alignment with GitLab values, especially collaboration, iteration, and transparency.

Benefits

• Benefits to support your