Backend Engineering Roles at GitLab

Backend Engineers at GitLab work on our product. This includes both the open source version of GitLab, the enterprise editions, and the GitLab.com service as well. They work with peers on teams dedicated to areas of the product. They work together with product managers, designers, and frontend engineers to solve common goals.

Unless otherwise specified, all Backend Engineering roles at GitLab share the following requirements and responsibilities:

Requirements

Significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails or language required by the specialty

language required by the specialty Professional experience with any other technologies that may be required by the specialty

Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment

Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions

Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems

Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process

Demonstrated ability to onboard and integrate with an organization long-term

Positive and solution-oriented mindset

Effective communication skills: Regularly achieve consensus with peers, and clear status updates

An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility

Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.

Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational skills.

Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization

Share our values, and work in accordance with those values

Ability to thrive in a fully remote organization

Ability to use GitLab

Nice-to-haves

Experience in a peak performance organization, preferably a tech startup

Experience with the GitLab product as a user or contributor

Product company experience

Experience working with a remote team

Enterprise software company experience

Developer platform/tool industry experience

Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team

Computer science education or equivalent experience

Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools

Responsibilities

Develop features and improvements to the GitLab product in a secure, well-tested, and performant way

Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders within Engineering (Frontend, UX, etc.) to maintain a high bar for quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment

Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance

Solve technical problems of moderate scope and complexity.

Craft code that meets our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.

Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team ("technical debt"), propose and implement solutions

Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around specific projects and community contributions.

Confidently ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.

Participate in Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday and weekend and occasional night on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

Professional Experience

At GitLab, due to the pace we're moving, people joining our team will be expected to have significant professional experience in the primary programming language of the specialty that they'll be joining. Because the majority of our codebase is written in Ruby, even in specialized roles, a knowledge of Ruby and Ruby on Rails or a desire to learn and contribute is necessary.

For context, see this merge request with some history on this policy.

Primary programming language

Some specialties within GitLab are using primary programming languages other than Ruby. These programming languages are defined as being primary in terms of an engineer's experience and what they'll be writing day to day. The expecation from the specialty is that engineers will have extensive experience in this primary programming language as well as some level of understanding of Ruby and, Ruby on Rails.

Backend Engineer Performance Indicators

Backend Engineers have the following job-family performance indicators.

Engineering Managers have the following job-family performance indicators.

Levels

Read more about levels at GitLab here.

Junior Backend Engineer

Junior Backend Engineers share the same requirements and responsibilities outlined above, but typically join with less or alternate experience than a typical Backend Engineer.

Job Grade

The Junior Backend Engineer is a grade 5.

Backend Engineer

Job Grade

The Backend Engineer is a grade 6.

Senior Backend Engineer

The Senior Backend Engineer role extends the Backend Engineer role.

Job Grade

The Senior Backend Engineer is a grade 7.

Responsibilities

Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance that have particular impact across your team.

Solve technical problems of high scope and complexity.

Exert influence on the overall objectives and long-range goals of your team.

Experience with performance and optimization problems, particularly at large scale, and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems

Help to define and improve our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.

Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around broader initiatives, specific projects, and community contributions.

Provide mentorship for Junior and Intermediate Engineers on your team to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and remove blockers to their autonomy.

Confidently ship moderately sized features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.

Improves the engineering projects at GitLab via maintainer trainee program at own comfortable pace, while striving to become a project maintainer.

A Senior Backend Engineer may want to pursue the engineering management track at this point as a manager of people or a higher level individual contributor. See Engineering Career Development for more detail.

Note: Staff and above positions at GitLab are more of a role than just a "level". We prefer to bring people in as Senior and let the team elevate them to Staff due to an outstanding work history within GitLab.

Staff Backend Engineer

The Staff Backend Engineer role extends the Senior Backend Engineer role as an individual contributor.

Job Grade

The Staff Backend Engineer is a grade 8.

Responsibilities

Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance that have particular impact across your team and others.

Solve technical problems of the highest scope and complexity for your team.

Exert significant influence on the overall objectives and long-range goals of your team.

Shepherd the definition and improvement of our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.

Drive innovation on the team with a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of immense complexity and scope.

Actively seek out difficult impediments to our efficiency as a team ("technical debt"), propose and implement solutions that will enable the entire team to iterate faster

Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around broad initiatives, specific projects, and community contributions. Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your team.

Provide mentorship for all Engineers on your team to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and remove blockers to their autonomy.

Confidently ship large features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.

Backend Manager, Engineering

The Manager, Engineering specializes in Backend Engineering Management as a manager of people. Managers in Engineering at GitLab see their team as their product. While they are technically credible and know the details of what engineers work on, their time is spent safeguarding their team's health, hiring a world-class team, and putting them in the best position to succeed. They own the delivery of product commitments and are always looking to improve productivity. They must also coordinate across departments to accomplish collaborative goals.

Job Grade

The Backend Manager, Engineering role is a grade 8.

Responsibilities

Help your engineers grow their skills and experience

Author project plans for epics

Run agile project management processes

Conduct code reviews, and make technical contributions to product architecture as well as getting involved in solving bugs and delivering small features

Actively seek and hire globally-distributed talent

Conduct managerial interviews for candidates, and train the team to do technical interviews

Contribute to the sense of psychological safety on your team

Generate and implement process improvements

Hold regular 1:1's with all members of their team

Give regular and clear feedback around the individual's performance

Foster technical decision making on the team, but make final decisions when necessary

Draft quarterly OKRs and Engineering KPIs

Improve product quality, security, and performance

Requirements

Exquisite brokering skills: regularly achieve consensus amongst departments

5 years or more experience

2 years or more experience in a leadership role with current technical experience

In-depth experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, and/or Git, in addition to any experience required by the position's specialty

Excellent written and verbal communication skills

You share our values, and work in accordance with those values

Ability to use GitLab

Nice-to-have Requirement

Experience in a peak performance organization

Deep Ruby on Rails experience

Golang experience

Product company experience

Startup experience

Enterprise software company experience

Computer science education or equivalent experience

Passionate about open source and developer tools

Career Ladder

For more details on the engineering career ladders, please review the engineering career development handbook page.

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can generally expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Note that as candidates indicate preference or aptitude for one or more specialties, the hiring process will be adjusted to suit. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find their job title on our team page.

For Individual Contributors:

As part of the application, candidates are asked to complete a short technical questionnaire, with a possibility of additional technical questions being asked if needed after the application is submitted.

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Technical Recruiters

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 90 minute technical interview with one of our Backend Engineers

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute interview with one of our Backend Engineering Managers

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute interview with our Director of Engineering

Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer. Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

For Managers:

Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Technical Recruiters

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute first interview with a Director of Engineering, Backend

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute second peer interview with an Engineering Manager

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute third interview with another member of the Engineering team

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fourth interview with a member of the Product team

Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fifth interview with our VP of Engineering

Finally, candidates may be asked to schedule a 50 minute final interview with our CEO

Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email

Specialties

Distribution

The Distribution team closely partners with our greater engineering organization to build, configure and automate GitLab deployments. GitLab's distribution team is tasked with creating a seamless installation and upgrade experience for users across a multitude of platforms.

Distribution engineering regularly interfaces with broader development teams in supporting newly created features. Notably, our infrastructure team is the distribution team's biggest internal customer, so there is significant team interdependency. The Distribution team is involved with diverse projects and tasks that include assisting community packaging efforts. This is reflected in the job role:

Development and maintenance of Cloud Native GitLab deployment tooling and upgrade methods

Support Omnibus GitLab package installations across multiple Linux based Operating Systems

Experience with various Cloud provider deployment methods including AWS Cloudformation, GCP Deployment Manager, Azure Resource Manager

Requirements

Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production use cases

Chef experience (writing complex cookbooks from scratch, custom providers, custom resources, etc.)

Extensive Linux experience, comfortable between Debian and RHEL based systems

Experience building and packaging archives such as .deb and .rpm

Package

Package engineers are focused on creating the binary repository management system that will extend our Continuous Integration (CI) functionality to allow access and management of artifacts manipulated by projects.

By extending the current CI artifacts system, the Package team will expose GitLab as a package repository allowing access to the most common package managers, e.g. Maven and APT and similar. Additionally, the Package team is improving the Container Registry and is responsible for items listed under Package product category.

Responsibilities

Develop the architecture by extending existing features

Work with the Distribution team on replacing their current delivery system

Create and maintain observability of the newly defined features

Work with customers on defining their needs to replace existing package repository solutions

Defend

Focus on security defend features for GitLab (including web application firewall, threat detection, container security, network security, and vulnerability management). This role will report to and collaborate directly with the Defend Engineering Manager.

Requirements

Strong engineer with Go and Ruby experience.

Passion for security.

Understanding of all levels of OSI network model and common network protocols.

Understanding of infrastructure & application deployment models (Kubernetes, Docker, AWS/GCP/Azure).

Understanding of detecting and preventing attacks at the network, container, operating system, and application level.

Understanding of vulnerability lifecycle (including CVE).

A passion for learning new languages & technologies.

Experience with open source security tools (such as Kali, ModSecurity, Wireshark, Falco, etc).

Experience in using GitLab and GitLab CI.

Responsibilities

Develop security components from proposal to polished end result.

Integrating 3rd party security tools into production environments deployed by GitLab.

Secure

Focus on security features for GitLab. This role will specifically focus on security; if you want to work with Ruby on Rails and not security, please apply to our Backend Engineer role instead. This role will report to and collaborate directly with the Secure Engineering Manager.

Requirements

Strong Go and/or Ruby engineer with security expertise or proven security interest.

Passion and interest toward security (scanning, dependencies, etc.).

Experience in using GitLab and GitLab CI.

Responsibilities

Develop security tools from proposal to polished end result.

Integrating 3rd party security tools into GitLab.

Complete our internal Advisories Database.

Manage metadata related to dependencies.

Key aspects of this role are focused on security tools and features.

The complexity of this role will increase over time.

If you are willing to stick to working on these features for at least a year, then this role is for you.

Configuration

The configuration team works on GitLab's Application Control Panel, Infrastructure Configuration features, our ChatOps product, Feature flags, and our entire Auto DevOps feature set. It is part of our collection of Ops Backend teams.

Requirements

Experienced engineer who is capable of leading and growing a team of senior engineers.

For this position, a significant amount of experience with Ruby is a strict requirement. Experience with Go is a plus as we expect that you will likely work on Go during your journey at GitLab.

Experience with Docker, Kubernetes platform development.

Experience or interest in functions-as-a-service.

Responsibilities

Implement and improve upon our constellation of configuration feature set.

Work with the PM team to execute on the roadmap.

Ensure we deliver on our commitments to the market by communicating clearly with stakeholders.

Implement the appropriate monitoring and alerting on new and existing features owned by the team.

Help others adopt and use the configuration features.

CI/CD

CI/CD Backend Engineers are primarily tasked with improving the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) functionality in GitLab. Engineers should be willing to learn Kubernetes and Container Technology. CI/CD Engineers should always have three goals in mind:

Provide value to the user and communicate such with product managers, Introduce features that work at scale and in untrusting environments, Always focus on defining and shipping the Minimal Viable Change.

We, as a team, cover end-to-end integration of CI/CD in GitLab, with components being written in Rails and Go. We work on a scale of processing a few million of CI/CD jobs on GitLab.com monthly. CI/CD engineering is interlaced with a number of teams across GitLab. We build new features by following our direction. Currently, we focus on providing a deep integration of Kubernetes with GitLab:

by automating application testing and deployment through Auto DevOps, by managing GitLab Runners on top of Kubernetes, by working with other teams that provide facilities to monitor all running applications, in the future implement A-B testing, feature flags, etc.

Additionally, we also focus on improving the efficiency, performance, and scalability of all aspects of CI/CD:

Improve performance of developer workflows, e.g. faster CI testing, by improving parallelization, Improve performance of implementation, ex.:by allowing us to run 10-100x more in one year, Identify and add features needed by us, ex.:to allow us to test more reliably and ship faster.

The CI/CD Engineering Manager also does weekly stand-up with a team and product managers to talk about plan for the work in the upcoming week and coordinates a deployment of CI/CD related services with infrastructure team.

Requirements

Go developer with a lot of Kubernetes production experience is a plus

Geo

GitLab Geo is an enterprise product feature, built to help speed up the development of distributed teams by providing one or more read-only mirrors of a primary GitLab instance. This mirror (a Geo secondary node) reduces the time to clone or fetch large repositories and projects, or can be part of a Disaster Recovery solution.

Responsibilties

Work with the Product Manager to carefully assess technical feasibility of feature requests

Deliver proof-of-concept proposals to help guide technical discussions

Identify ways to deliver complex technical projects in an iterative fashion

Take ownership of feature implementation

Respond quickly to customer requests for support

Requirements

Experience designing and building fault-tolerant, distributed systems

Experience building and scaling highly-available systems

Experience with queueing and messaging systems

In-depth experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, and/or Git

Experience with provisioning tools is beneficial but not essential

Growth

Growth Engineers work with a cross-functional team to influence the growth of GitLab as a business. In helping us iterate and learn rapidly, these engineers enable us to more effectively meet the needs of potential users.

Requirements

Strong self-direction (this team is being bootstrapped)

Experience with A/B, multivariate, or other data-driven methods of testing

Comfort multitasking in a highly iterative environment

Engineering Productivity

Engineering Productivity Engineers are full-stack engineers primarily tasked with improving the productivity of the GitLab developers (from both GitLab Inc and the rest of the community), and making the GitLab project maintainable in the long-term.

Responsibilities

Build automated measurements and dashboards to gain insights into the productivity of the Engineering organization to identify opportunities for improvement.

Increase contributor and developer productivity by making measurement-driven improvements to the development tools / workflow / processes, then monitor the results, and iterate.

Dogfood GitLab product features to improve developer workflow and provide feedback to product teams.

Develop automated processes for improving label classification hygiene in support of product and engineering workflows.

Participate in activities related to Engineering throughput and Quality KPIs

Help with maintaining backend development with GitLab Docs.

Requirements

Experience developing in Ruby (this is a strict requirement).

Experience in with test automation frameworks for both front-end and back-end testing.

Experience in designing and developing tools and solutions used across teams.

Development experience in object-oriented programming languages and patterns.

Excellent oral and written communication skills.

Experience with a front-end charting/visualization library.

Experience using test automation tools. (Selenium, Capybara, Watir).

Experience using Continuous Integration systems (e.g., GitLab CI, Jenkins, Travis).

Experience using Docker and containerized architectures (e.g. Kubernetes).

See the description of the Engineering Productivity team for more details. The position also involves working with the community as merge request coach, and working together with our Backend Engineers to respond and address issues from the community.

Engineering Productivity Performance Indicators

Engineering Productivity Engineers have the following job-family performance indicators.

Memory

The Memory team is responsible for optimizing GitLab application performance by managing the memory resources required. The team is also responsible for changes affecting the responsiveness of the application.

Responsibilities

Identify, troubleshoot, improve and manage memory-intensive aspects of the GitLab application.

Explore alternatives outside of the GitLab application for reducing memory consumption through contributions to, e.g., Rails, Ruby, Puma, or other key third-party components.

Define and help implement best practices for creating efficient and performant code.

Setting standards that changes are not affecting memory utilization and can be validated.

Partner with the Quality team to maintain effective performance reporting and monitoring through instrumentation and testing.

Requirements

An ideal engineer candidate -

Expert of Ruby on Rails.

Experience of performance tuning and/or architecture, Example.

Experience of memory leak troubleshooting, Example 1, Example 2.

Alternatively, some of the following qualifications, may not necessarily be all -

Must be proficient in one or more of the following in preference order Ruby. Go. Similar OOP languages (e.g. Python, C++, Java, C#, etc.). AND/OR proficient in one or more of the following Proven record of building scalable solutions. Top notch understanding of DB principles and optimization mechanisms. Familiar with a framework similar to the concepts of Rails (e.g. CakePHP, Ember, Node.js, Angular, J2EE, etc.) - For reference and apply with due diligence. High-level principles: has knowledge of existing perf testing tools and test automation with some Ruby. Low-level principles: Understands internals, how memory works, garbage collection. Sorting algorithms. Nice to have Tuning up performance from architecture/design perspective. Troubleshooting memory leaks (any language). Optimizing full stack implementation, e.g. I/O, caching. Good knowledge of performance testing. Strong problem analysis and solving skills, methodological in problem solving. Must be a proven fast-learner and self-starter.

Ecosystem

The Ecosystem team is responsible for seamless integration between GitLab and 3rd party products as well as making GitLab products available on cloud service providers’ marketplaces such as AWS. The team plays a critical role in developing APIs and SDK and expanding GitLab market opportunities.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain APIs, Webhooks, and SDK of Gitlab products.

Design, build, and maintain solutions to integrate to partner and 3rd party platforms.

Design, build, and maintain solutions for integrating with cloud service provider marketplaces, such as AWS.

Develop documentation and instructions of how to work with GitLab SDK & APIs.

Requirements

Previous experience developing REST and/or GraphQL APIs using a variety of technologies.

Previous experience working with Open API standards such as Swagger.

Proficient with Ruby.

Proficient or fluent with one or more of other common languages: Go, Python, Java, Node, JavaScript, etc.

Familiar with full web technology stack (e.g. HTTP, cookies, asset loading, caching).

Gitaly

Gitaly is a new service in our architecture that handles git and other filesystem operations for GitLab instances, and aims to improve reliability and performance while scaling to meet the needs of installations with thousands of concurrent users, including our site GitLab.com. This position reports to the Gitaly Lead.

Responsibilities

Participate in architectural discussions and decisions surrounding Gitaly.

Scope, estimate and describe tasks to reach the team’s goals.

Collaborate on designing RPC interfaces for the Gitaly service

Instrument, monitor and profile Gitaly in the production environment.

Build dashboards and alerts to monitor the health of your services.

Conduct acceptance testing of the features you’ve built.

Educate all team members on best practices relating to high availability.

Requirements:

Mandatory: production experience building, debugging, optimising software in large-scale, high-volume environments.

Highly desirable: a good understanding of git’s internal data structures or experience running git servers. You can reason about software, algorithms, and performance from a high level.

Mandatory: willingness to learn Ruby.

Highly desirable: Experience working with Go. It’s important that candidates must be willing to learn and work in Go.

Highly desirable: experience with gRPC.

Understanding of how to build instrumented, observable software systems.

Experience highly-available systems in production environments.

Meltano (BizOps Product)

Meltano is an early stage project at GitLab focused on delivering an open source framework for analytics, business intelligence, and data science. It leverages version control, data science tools, CI, CD, Kubernetes, and review apps.

A Meltano Engineer will be tasked with executing on the vision of the Meltano project, to bring the product to market.

Requirements

A passion for data science and analytics

Experience with doing initial prototyping, architecture, and engineering work

In-depth experience with Python (no Ruby or Rails experience required for this role)

Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and CI/CD is a strict requirement

Database

A database specialist is an engineer that focuses on database related changes and improvements. You will spend the majority of your time making application changes to improve database performance, availability, and reliability.

Unlike the Database Engineer position the database specialist title has a balance of application development and knowledge of PostgreSQL. As such Ruby knowledge is absolutely required and deep PostgreSQL knowledge is equally important.

Requirements

Significant professional software engineering experience with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL in large production environments

Demonstrated experience with Ruby on Rails or other Ruby frameworks such as Sinatra or Hanami

Expert-level understanding of relational databases, SQL and query optimization techniques and demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent performance problems

Significant experience working in a distributed production environment

Gitter

Gitter specialists are full-stack JavaScript developers who are able to write JavaScript code that is shared between multiple environments. Gitter uses a JavaScript stack running Node.js on the server, and bundled with webpack on the client. The iOS, Android, macOS (Cocoa) and Linux/Windows (NW.js) clients reuse much of the same codebase but also require some knowledge of Objective-C, Swift and Java. Gitter uses MongoDB, Redis, and Elasticsearch for backend storage.

Requirements

Strong client-side JavaScript experience

Strong production Node.js experience

Highly desirable: MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Redis experience

Desirable: Some Java, Objective-C or Swift experience building mobile apps

Desirable: DevOps experience, working with Linux, Ansible, AWS or similar products

Responsibilities

Fix prioritized issues from the issue tracker

Triage issues (duplicates, clarification, reproduction steps, prioritization)

Create high quality frontend and backend code

Review community contributions

Provide second-level support to the Production Team to ensure that all Gitter production services remain stable

Document tribal knowledge, particularly around runbooks and production incident processes

Keep an eye on Sentry to find regressions and ensure application errors are addressed

Continually improve the quality of Gitter by using discretion of where you think changes are needed

Continue to migrate the codebase from old repository locations to GitLab, while open-sourcing as much of it as possible

Maintain the iOS, Android, and desktop applications

Provide community support for Gitter via Gitter rooms, Twitter, Zendesk, etc

Infrastructure

Infrastructure specialists work alongide DBREs and SREs and are experienced Ruby/GoLang developers who work in the product with a focus on reliability, observability, performance and scalability at the application level, as well as on resource optimization from an Infrastructure perspective and on operationally relevant features.

Requirements

Strong Ruby and Golang experience required

Strong experience with profiling and metrics analysis

Strong experience with observability tools, including metrics (Prometheus is a plus), structured logging and distributed tracing

Desirable: DevOps experience, working with Linux, GCP/AWS, Chef/Ansible, or similar products

ActiveRecord and SQL expertise

Responsibilities

Fix relevant Infrastructure-related issues from the issue tracker

Develop operations-related features

Focus on reliability, performance and scalability, as well as resource optimization

Delivery

Delivery specialist is an engineer that focuses on improving the engineering release workflows, creates new tools, improves release process and works closely with the whole Engineering team to ensure that every GitLab release reaches the public in time.

Responsibilities

Guarantees the GitLab Release Process

Creates new tools to automate the release process

Builds new GitLab release features to replace existing custom tooling

Works with individual teams on defining and implementing solutions that will help them release quicker

Creates frameworks that allow engineers to write code that scales with demand

Helps teams instrument their code and helps recognize parts of code that could benefit from increased observability

Works closely with peer Infrastructure teams to control the impact of application code running in user facing products

Helps communicate the release schedule clearly with others

Develop monitoring and alerting to measure release process velocity

Identify process bottlenecks and introduce optimizations

Scalability

The Scalability team is responsible for optimising GitLab.com performance through improving reliability, availability and performance of GitLab individual services and application as a whole.

Responsibilities

Analyse existing, create and maintain new GitLab.com Service Level Objectives.

Resolve problems contributing to missing GitLab.com SLO targets.

Find, define and resolve architectural application bottlenecks as observed on GitLab.com.

Work with other engineering stakeholders on resolving larger architectural bottlenecks and participate as a representative of GitLab.com.

Provide guidance to other engineering stakeholders on scaling considerations.

Requirements

Candidate should ideally be:

Methodical when troubleshooting and solving problems.

Experienced in working on large scale systems.

Experienced in application and systems observability.

Have working knowledge of one or more of the services used to deliver GitLab.com.

Other qualifications include:

High proficiency in at least one of the following programming languages, in order of preference: Ruby. Go. Knowledge of other OOP languages is a nice to have.

Proficient in one or more of the following: Knowledge of profiling, and performance testing. Understanding of basic database principles and optimisation mechanisms.



Search

Elasticsearch engineers are focused on delivering a first class global search experience throughout GitLab products. They are experienced Ruby/GoLang developers who focus on implementing core Elasticsearch functions while advising other development teams on best practices (e.g. indexing).

Requirements

Elasticsearch experience - modeling, processing, nodes and index management

Proficient in Go (Golang) and/or Ruby, Ruby on Rails

Desirable: DevOps experience, working with Linux, GCP/AWS, Chef/Ansible, or similar products

Desirable: PostgreSQL experience

Responsibilities

Building a first class global search implementation

Improve and implement our indexing strategies

Own architecture, performance and scaling of the Elasticsearch solution

Build responsive and scalable services and APIs in Go

Self-managed installation mechanisms

About GitLab

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.

We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.

Top 10 reasons to work for GitLab:

Work with helpful, kind, motivated, and talented people. Work remote so you have no commute and are free to travel and move. Have flexible work hours so you are there for other people and free to plan the day how you like. Everyone works remote, but you don't feel remote. We don't have a head office, so you're not in a satellite office. Work on open source software so you can interact with a large community and can show your work. Work on a product you use every day: we drink our own wine. Work on a product used by lots of people that care about what you do. As a company we contribute more than we take, most of our work is released as the open source GitLab CE. Focused on results, not on long hours, so that you can have a life and don't burn out. Open internal processes: know what you're getting in to and be assured we're thoughtful and effective.

See our culture page for more!