Senior Backend Engineer, AI Powered: Duo Chat (EMEA)

The GitLab DevSecOps platform empowers 100,000+ organizations to deliver software faster and more efficiently. We are one of the world’s largest all-remote companies with 2,000+ team members and values that foster a culture where people embrace the belief that everyone can contribute. Learn more about Life at GitLab.

An overview of this role

Are you a seasoned backend engineer with a passion for AI? GitLab has an exciting opportunity for you! Join our remote team working on GitLab Duo Chat, a cutting-edge AI feature. Your main challenge: enhance AI capabilities, add tools, and ensure a robust system. We're an agile, collaborative team, interacting with backend engineers, data scientists, and product managers.

Success is measured by your code quality and contributions to GitLab Duo Chat. This role offers a chance to shape the future of AI chat tech. If you have skills in Ruby on Rails, Python, AI tech, and GitLab Duo Chat experience, plus extras like GraphQL and RSpec, we want you!

What you’ll do  

• 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 as a project maintainer. For more information regarding timelines and exceptions, see this page.

What you’ll bring 

• Ruby on Rails professional experience (5+ years preferred)
• Experience with Python development
• Knowledge of AI technologies, experience with GitLab Duo Chat a plus
• Experience with GraphQL and RSpec.
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for achieving consensus and 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
• Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.
• Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational skills.
• Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process
• Positive and solution-oriented mindset
• An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility
• You are familiar with working in an open source environment
• You are comfortable working in a cross-functional organization
• You are able to thrive in a fully remote organization
• You are able to use GitLab
• You share our values, and work in accordance with those values

 Bonus qualifications

• Experience with large language models
• Experience with Google Vertex AI and Anthropic 
• Experience with debugging and testing AI features
• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to adapt quickly to new information

About the team

Welcome to the heart of innovation at GitLab! Picture this: a remote team, spanning across the globe, passionately working on GitLab Duo Chat, a game-changing feature fueled by AI. 

The challenge? It's thrilling. This team is on a mission to enhance the AI capabilities of GitLab Duo Chat. From crafting and iterating prompts to integrating cutting-edge tools, they're dedicated to ensuring a robust and error-resistant system. The roadmap? Think improving debugging and testing p