Senior Backend Engineer

Role Overview

Join GitLab as a Senior Backend Engineer on the Cells Infrastructure team. You will help build the foundation for GitLab.com to scale horizontally using a Cells architecture, focusing on edge routing services and the Topology Service.

Key Missions

• Build routing and topology services that direct traffic across a fleet of independent clusters.
• Develop and maintain systems that store, update, and serve topology information, which supports routing and resource assignment.
• Collaborate with other GitLab teams to make features and data models cell-aware and participate in merge request reviews.

Responsibilities

• Operate and continuously improve the systems you build.
• Maintain high standards for correctness, performance, and security.
• Contribute to async-first documentation, including architecture decision records and runbooks.
• Take operational ownership, including incident response.

Requirements

• Production experience with relational databases, including schema design, migrations, and query performance tuning (PostgreSQL is a plus).
• Observability practices: metrics, tracing, alerting, with an on-call/operator mindset.
• Experience building resilient, observable production services using Go or Ruby on Rails.
• Ability to build high-throughput networking services (gRPC and protocol buffers are a plus).
• Strong async communication skills, including writing documentation and runbooks.
• Experience delivering and operating systems in high-scale environments, including incident response.
• Distributed systems reasoning: consistency models, partitioning, failure modes, tradeoffs.
• Experience working in large multi-team codebases and coordinating cross-service changes.

Nice-to-haves

• PostgreSQL experience
• TypeScript experience
• gRPC and protocol buffers knowledge

Flexibility Note

GitLab encourages candidates with varying experience levels to apply; successful candidates may not meet every requirement.