Staff Backend Engineer, Core DevOps

An overview of this role

As a Staff Backend Engineer on GitLab's Core DevOps team, you'll provide technical leadership across your team and adjacent teams. You'll lead large backend initiatives, guide the modernization of a large monolith into modular, reusable, appropriately independent systems, and set standards that help teams move faster without compromising quality, security, reliability, or operability.

You'll work with Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, Security, Data, Engineering Managers, and engineers across product groups. You'll lead complex backend architecture, make product trade-offs, and influence technical direction without formal authority.

GitLab is an open core software company that develops an artificial intelligence-powered DevSecOps platform. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. We work in an all-remote, asynchronous environment where you communicate decisions clearly in writing and work independently.

What you’ll do

• Lead the technical design and delivery of backend initiatives that span teams, and identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups.
• Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture, including modernization of the monolith and legacy backends while preventing fragmentation and service sprawl.
• Define and improve standards for application programming interfaces, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability.
• Establish patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation.
• Establish Go service patterns and Kubernetes operating practices where they matter to the production estate, and guide Rust adoption where it addresses systems, security, performance, or supply-chain needs.
• Take part in on-call and incident response for systems your teams own, serve as a technical escalation point during complex incidents, and turn lessons from incidents into lasting improvements.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmap decisions and investment trade-offs.
• Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, reduce technical debt, build reusable patterns that improve team throughput, and lead adoption of artificial intelligence-assisted and agentic workflows with quality, security, privacy, and operational guardrails.

What you’ll bring

• A record of leading technical work across more than one team or a broad product area.
• Deep backend architecture and production experience with complex applications, services, or platforms, including application programming interfaces, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components.
• Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production and using modular approaches such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, or event-driven boundaries.
• Experience building alignment through clear written proposals and decision records so teams document, understand, and adopt technical decisions.
• Experience making trade-offs among customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment.
• Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and practice.
• Production experience with artificial intelligence-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including improving how a team adopts them.

About the team

The Core DevOps team owns core repository capabilities, from Git command-line operations to web-based code exploration. We build features and platforms, improve existing capabilities, and improve maintainability, accessibility, performance, and workflows for teams using artificial intelligence-assisted development tools.