Senior Backend Engineer, Platform Readiness at GitLab

About GitLab

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. We empower organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. With over 50 million registered users, more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to build better, more secure software faster.

Our high-performance culture emphasizes embracing AI as a core productivity multiplier, expecting all team members to integrate AI into their daily workflows. At GitLab, careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. We are building technology that transforms how the world develops software.

Note: Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 references are based on GitLab data and are subject to trademark licensing.

The Role: Senior Backend Engineer, Platform Readiness

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our newly established Platform Readiness team. Your mission will be to architect and evolve the systems that ensure features successfully deploy across all GitLab platforms by automating the evaluation of platform readiness requirements and surfacing risks early.

You will serve as a technical anchor for the team, driving the evolution of platform readiness from manual, ad-hoc assessments toward intelligent, agentic automation. Your work will directly impact GitLab's ability to ship features faster and dramatically reduce the operational burden of cross-platform validation. You will receive mentorship and technical guidance as you help define the technical direction for this critical team.

What You Will Do

• Contribute to the Platform Readiness team's agentic workflows on the Duo Agent Platform by designing, implementing, and evolving the Core Agentic Workflow and the Requirements Agent for automated platform readiness assessments.
• Evolve the platform requirements knowledge base by contributing to schema design, validation tooling, and CI systems, ensuring the schema captures the full scope of platform readiness concerns across all four platforms and domains.
• Build integration surfaces that allow feature teams to engage the Platform Readiness team where they already work, including issues, merge requests, design documents, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Partner with platform teams (Infrastructure, Security, Data) to translate their deep expertise into structured platform requirements, domain skills, and validation logic without requiring specific domain knowledge from you.
• Contribute to the quality control feedback loop by designing systems that surface assessment errors, missed gaps, and content drift back to the governance loop for continuous improvement. You will also measure and improve assessment accuracy and guidance relevance.
• Mentor other engineers on the team regarding agentic workflow standards, prompt discipline, evaluation methodology, and the principles of human-AI collaboration in platform readiness.
• Contribute to technical documentation and architectural decision records detailing the Platform Readiness team's technical evolution and rationale for key design choices.

What You Will Bring

Required Experience & Skills

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 2+ years focused on backend, platform, or developer-facing tooling.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node, Python, or Golang (Ruby is a plus).
• Proven experience shipping developer-facing tooling where the primary user is another engineer.
• Solid understanding of GitLab-style development workflows (issues, epics, merge requests, CI/CD, code review) as artifacts that automation can interpret.
• Ability to thrive in cross-functional environments across multiple platform teams.
• Experience with structured content systems, schemas, or validation tooling.

Highly Valued Experience

• Familiarity with AI/agentic systems (DAP, ADK, LangGraph, or similar) OR a demonstrated ability to reason rigorously about the boundary between AI decision-making and human ownership.
• Experience integrating with LLM APIs, considering cost, latency, evaluation, and failure modes.
• Background in developer experience or platform engineering.
• Experience with governance patterns for shared standards and cross-organizational decision making.
• A history of open source contributions in platform, developer experience, or AI infrastructure.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases at scale.

What Makes You Stand Out (Strong Plus)

• Having shipped agentic workflows in production and managed the operational complexities of AI driven automation.
• Experience designing schema-driven content systems used by non-engineer authors and evolving them as requirements change.
• A track record of building developer platform teams at scale and understanding the dynamics of enabling other engineers.
• Experience with observability and monitoring for AI systems, including evaluation metrics, cost tracking, and failure analysis.
• The ability to articulate complex concepts like agentic workflows, platform readiness, and governance clearly to technical teams, product managers, and executives.

About the Team and GitLab Benefits

The Platform Readiness team resides within GitLab Developer Experience. We are focused on building the internal tooling required to embed platform readiness intelligence across GitLab's four deployment targets: Self-Managed, Dedicated, Dedicated for Government, and GitLab.com. We collaborate with platform teams, feature teams, and product management to guarantee every feature meets platform readiness requirements before release.

Current Challenges We Address:

• Transitioning from manual coordination to embedded automation, moving towards automated, agentic evaluation while maintaining human oversight.
• Creating a structured, machine readable requirements body by evolving the platform readiness schema.
• Making platform readiness native to existing tools used by feature teams.
• Building measurement systems to ensure we know our work is effective and surface failures early.

Team Structure: You will join a newly formed Platform Readiness team. As a Senior Engineer, you will work closely with leadership to define technical direction and mentor other engineers on team standards and architecture.

How GitLab Supports Full Time Employees

• Benefits designed 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.

Note: GitLab welcomes interest from all experience levels. We encourage applications even if you do not meet every single requirement, as we value diverse perspectives.

Hiring Guidelines and Application

GitLab hires team members globally. All roles are remote, though some may have specific location eligibility requirements which the Talent Acquisition team can clarify. We are an equal opportunity workplace committed to merit, regardless of background.

To apply, please provide your First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone Number, and Country.