Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), AI Engineering: AI Coding at GitLab

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to boost developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security risks, and accelerate digital transformation. Trusted by over 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100, GitLab helps ship better, more secure software faster. The company embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier, expecting all team members to integrate AI into their daily workflows for efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab offers an environment where careers flourish, innovation thrives, and every voice is valued, driven by strong values and continuous knowledge exchange.

An Overview of This Role

GitLab, an open core software company, develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, utilized by over 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to empower everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. This is achieved by operating on our own product and adhering to our core values. The AI Events team is responsible for building the event platform and trigger system that drive GitLab Duo Flows, enabling automated responses to events across the development lifecycle. This platform handles internal GitLab events, such as code pushes, issue/merge request changes, CI/CD pipeline results, and deployments, along with custom events from third-party tools like Jira, Jenkins, and Slack. Flow Triggers connect projects to flows, automatically firing when matching events occur, which allows AI-powered workflows, like automated code review, to run seamlessly.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will join a close-knit team maintaining critical infrastructure for many of GitLab's AI features. Your primary focus will be on the trigger system, linking events across GitLab and third-party tools to relevant AI workflows. This system requires high availability and significant scalability, as it is central to automated AI-enabled work across the platform.

What You'll Do

• Design and build the trigger system that connects GitLab events (including code pushes, merge request and issue changes, CI/CD results, and deployments) and third-party events (from tools like Jira, Jenkins, and Slack) to the AI-powered Duo Flows that act on them.
• Contribute to the broader event platform, which serves as the core infrastructure for many of GitLab's AI features, determining when and how they run.
• Architect for high availability and throughput to reliably process events at scale, as this system is central to automated AI workflows across GitLab.
• Work predominantly within GitLab's Rails monolith, where the event and trigger system primarily resides, while remaining open to utilizing other languages used elsewhere in the platform.
• Influence product and architecture direction by proposing iterative solutions to complex technical challenges within a multi-service environment.
• Collaborate closely with your teammates, product manager, and designer to define the future capabilities of the trigger system, likely starting with new trigger types.
• Partner cross-departmentally with other Duo Agent Platform teams to ensure seamless integration of triggers and events within GitLab's broader agent ecosystem.
• Participate in Tier 2 and Tier 3 on-call rotations to resolve production, security, and urgent engineering issues in a globally distributed environment.

What You'll Bring

• Deep experience with Ruby and Rails, demonstrating comfort working effectively within a large, established monolith and shipping production-ready code.
• Proven track record building products that interact with large language models, focusing on integrating LLMs into user-facing tools rather than training or building the models themselves.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems built for large scale, with an emphasis on high availability and throughput in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with agentic systems and development, including constructing workflows that enable AI agents to take autonomous action.
• Ability to make progress in evolving problem spaces and quickly learn new AI capabilities as the underlying technology rapidly changes.
• Strong written communication skills essential for effective asynchronous collaboration within a remote, globally distributed team.
• Additional beneficial experience includes Python (as it's used in other parts of GitLab's AI platform) and practical experience using GitLab as a product.

About the Team

We are part of GitLab's AI Engineering organization, a small and growing team with members across Europe. We work closely with our manager, product manager, and designer, and coordinate cross-departmentally with other AI Engineering teams, emphasizing collaboration across GitLab's AI initiatives. Our team operates with an async-first approach, communicating via GitLab issues and Slack, with asynchronous standups and regular one-on-one meetings. We value autonomy and ownership, empowering engineers to make decisions and move quickly, balanced with high context sharing within the group. AI is a top priority at GitLab, offering the opportunity to work on cutting-edge technology in a high-impact, high-visibility area of the company.

How GitLab Supports Full Time Employees

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

Please note that GitLab welcomes candidates with varying levels of experience, and many successful applicants do not meet every single requirement. Studies indicate that individuals from underrepresented groups may be less likely to apply if they don't meet every qualification. If you are excited about this role, we encourage you to apply and allow our recruiters to evaluate your application.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members globally. All roles are remote, though some may have specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can address any location-related questions during the recruiting process.

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GitLab is an equal opportunity workplace and affirmative action employer. Our policies and practices for recruitment, employment, career development, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, without regard to 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, military discharge status, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. GitLab prohibits discrimination or harassment based on these characteristics. For more information, see GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you require accommodation due to a disability or special need, please inform us during the recruiting process.