Senior Backend Engineer, Development Health

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.

*Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on Development Health, you'll help make the systems that engineering teams rely on more reliable, maintainable, and easier to extend. You'll build and improve the automation, tooling, and data that help teams spot problems early and ship with less friction.

As customer zero for GitLab, we support engineering workflows on GitLab's own product at scale. You'll use the product in demanding, real-world ways, surface the friction and gaps you find, and contribute to improvements that get built into the product for GitLab's customers.

You'll support work such as:

• Health alerting and remediation routing for GitLab's core continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines
• Flaky and slow test detection systems
• Engineering analytics and reporting that engineering teams use to make decisions

What you’ll do

• Own and evolve core Development Health systems, from design through production.
• Improve the reliability, maintainability, and test coverage of long-lived automation, and reduce reliance on undocumented knowledge by documenting and simplifying legacy systems.
• Partner with engineering managers and product teams to identify workflow pain points and turn them into well-scoped, measurable improvements.
• Work with data to show whether changes improve engineering health, and use it to prioritize.
• Mentor intermediate engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing.
• Communicate clearly in writing and asynchronously, including status, tradeoffs, and proposals for stakeholders across Engineering.
• Monitor the health of production systems, troubleshoot incidents, and contribute to root cause analysis.
• Use artificial intelligence (AI) agents and assistants to analyze issues and problem areas to help shape the team's product roadmap.

What you’ll bring

• Substantial experience as a backend or tooling engineer, with a track record of owning production systems end to end.
• Strong proficiency in Ruby, or the ability to become productive quickly.
• Experience maintaining or modernizing legacy codebases safely.
• Comfort with CI/CD systems, application programming interfaces (APIs), and automation at scale.
• Independent problem-solving and clear, concise written communication: you spot problems early, raise risks proactively, and drive work to completion without close direction.
• Experience writing automated unit and integration tests and taking part in collaborative code review.
• Experience using AI coding assistants to speed up development while critically reviewing their output.
• Optional experience: Rails; developer productivity, engineering analytics, or internal tooling; GitLab's product and open source contribution workflow; data pipelines or metrics reporting; or agent-based workflows that run in production.

About the team

Development Health is part of Developer Experience. Our work is mostly internal, and our customers are GitLab team members across an engineering organization of hundreds of engineers.

We're all-remote, asynchronous by default, and documentation-driven, in line with GitLab's values of collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity, inclusion and belonging, iteration, and transparency.

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off 
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave 

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.  

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GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.