Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience at GitLab

Role Overview

As a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group, you will play a crucial role in helping GitLab improve the engineering experience across our internal engineering teams. We are currently at a pivotal moment, transforming our testing approach and overall development experience to allow engineers to deliver high-quality code with speed and confidence. The Developer Experience team consists of six globally distributed teams of Backend Engineers and Software Engineers in Test. Your work will span the entire group, focusing on identifying and eliminating the biggest points of friction that hinder development at GitLab. You will be expected to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions, and helping every team achieve its goals, while also being instrumental in shaping our engineering culture.

Project Examples

In this capacity, you may lead projects such as:

• Internal Developer Platform Adoption: Building and evolving platform capabilities that simplify the process for engineering teams to create, deploy, operate, and scale services on Kubernetes.
• Kubernetes-based Service Onboarding: Defining reusable service templates, deployment workflows, configuration patterns, and operational guardrails for teams using the platform.
• Developer Workflows and Test Environments: Building robust development, CI, and test environments that accurately reflect production Kubernetes behavior, including third-party operators and custom resources, ensuring engineers get fully reconciled, working environments.
• Platform Reliability and Observability: Collaborating with infrastructure and service teams to enhance rollout safety, troubleshooting capabilities, service health monitoring, resource management, and operational visibility across all Kubernetes workloads.

What You Will Do

• Lead and nurture a team responsible for developer tooling and internal platform capabilities utilized by our engineering teams to build and manage services.
• Set and execute a clear roadmap for Kubernetes-based developer workflows, carefully balancing developer experience, platform reliability, security, and operational efficiency.
• Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes, covering workloads, networking, configuration, secrets, identity, storage, observability, progressive delivery, and necessary custom resources and controllers.
• Ensure environment setup and teardown is deterministic by resolving readiness and ordering dependencies between CRDs, controllers, and dependent workloads, thus providing reproducible environments instead of intermittent failures.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and application teams to simplify complex Kubernetes capabilities into simple, well-supported workflows, avoiding the need for every service team to become a Kubernetes expert.
• Establish engineering standards, comprehensive documentation, automation, and feedback loops that drive adoption and reduce the time needed to move a service from development to production.
• Mentor engineers through architectural decisions, incident reviews, and production operations, always maintaining a focus on sustainable team delivery.
• Act as the team representative to technical and organizational stakeholders, clearly communicating trade-offs and using adoption and reliability metrics to guide prioritization.

What You Should Bring

• Deep experience in building developer tooling, Developer Experience (DevEx) platforms, testing frameworks, or CI/CD systems at a large scale.
• Strong practical experience with Go for designing, implementing, testing, and operating production quality services, command line tools, automation, or platform tooling. Experience contributing to Ruby based systems is also valuable for this role.
• Proficiency in practical Kubernetes experience, specifically building or operating production workloads and platform capabilities, including deployments, services, networking, configuration and secrets, observability, resource management, and troubleshooting.
• In depth knowledge of the Kubernetes deployment lifecycle: Helm based deployment and release management, kubeconfig and multi cluster context handling including deploying into clusters you do not own, and integrating third party operators and their custom resources (e.g., CloudNativePG, cert manager) into working environments, specifically handling readiness and ordering dependencies like CRD establishment and controller availability. Experience authoring a controller or operator is helpful but not mandatory.
• Proven experience designing scalable solutions that enhance engineering productivity, test reliability, development environments, or delivery workflows across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence without authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, and product functions.
• Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and production operations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, essential for a remote first environment.
• A strong product mindset paired with a passion for empowering developers through simple, reliable, and well documented workflows.
• Alignment with GitLab values, particularly collaboration, iteration, and transparency.

Compensation and Location

The base salary range listed for this role's level is currently intended for residents of the United States only. This range reflects the base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. Sales roles are eligible for incentive pay targeted up to 100% of the offered base salary. United States Salary Range $131,600 - $282,000 USD

We offer benefits to support your health, finances, and well being, including: Flexible Paid Time Off, Team Member Resource Groups, Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan, Growth and Development Fund, and Parental Leave.

Hiring Guidelines

GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, although some roles may carry specific location based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can assist with any location related questions after you begin the recruiting process. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and an affirmative action employer. GitLab's policies are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex, national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, genetic information, military discharge status, protected veteran status, or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics.

Application Process

If you are excited about this role, please apply. We welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience, as many successful candidates may not meet every single requirement.