Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

GitLab is an open core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating the rate of human progress. This mission is integral to our culture, influencing how we hire, build products, and lead our industry. We make this possible at GitLab by running our operations on our product and staying aligned with our values. Learn more about Life at GitLab.

Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise, and Duo Workflow, customers get the benefit of AI at every stage of the SDLC. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier. All team members are encouraged and expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact across our global organisation.

About the role

As a Staff Engineer in  GitLab's Developer Experience organization, you'll help drive engineering excellence at GitLab by creating tools that measure, analyze, and optimize development workflows and lead initiatives that enhance developer productivity.

What you'll do

• Contribute to the overall direction of the Developer Experience stage and Engineering-wide developer productivity initiatives through cross-team collaboration and technical leadership.
• Teach, mentor and grow engineers across teams while providing technical guidance aligned with strategic objectives
• Plan and execute improvements with a 12-month roadmap that supports stage-level OKRs
• Solve complex, ambiguous technical problems across teams, innovating through experimentation and boldly tackling large-scale challenges.
• Partner with the Management team, and enable Staff Engineers to engage on stage-level aspects of larger initiatives.
• Propose technical implementations that support architectural changes that solve scaling and performance problems.
• Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your stage.
• Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around broader initiatives, specific projects, and community contributions.
• Ship features and improvements independently with minimal guidance while mentoring other team members

Examples of initiatives you will work on

• Provide architectural leadership for improving merge request cycle time, CI/CD infrastructure, and development environments
• Drive technical solutions for code quality, performance optimization, and test framework enhancements
• Implement metrics and instrumentation to guide data-driven feature development
• Align stage level technical direction within Developer Experience and also across DevSecOps lifecycle stages

What you'll bring

• Strong proficiency in developing in Ruby or Golang (Ruby preferred)
• Strong experience working on public cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and managed compute platform (e.g, Google Cloud Run)
• Strong understanding of Infrastructure as Code & configuration management (Terraform & Ansible)
• Track record building developer tools that improve velocity, quality, and code health
• Experience with comprehensive testing approaches and product launches
• Strong experience with software design and architecture.
• Technical leadership experience setting direction and guiding project teams
• Background in engineering productivity, developer tooling, and test automation
• Experience managing data and building visualization with analytics platforms (e.g, Snowflake)

About the team:

Our mission is to empower developers by building tools that enhance engineering effectiveness, enabling GitLab to deliver high quality products faster to customers. Read more about the stage in