Staff Backend Engineer, AMER

Lead Cross-Cutting Initiatives: Lead the technical design and delivery of large backend initiatives that span teams, and identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups.

Own Architecture Strategy: Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture. Lead modernization of the monolith and legacy backends toward modular, reusable, and appropriately independently operated systems — while preventing fragmentation and service sprawl.

Set the Standards: Define and improve standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability — plus the build, test, deploy, release, rollback, and production-readiness practices needed to operate modular features safely.

Establish Shared Patterns: Create the patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation. Establish Go service patterns and Kubernetes operating practices where they matter to our production estate, and guide Rust adoption where it solves a real systems, security, performance, or supply-chain problem.

Own What You Build in Production: Take part in on-call and incident response for the systems your teams own, act as a technical escalation point during complex incidents, and turn what you learn into architectural and operational improvements that prevent recurrence.

Influence and Partner: Shape technical direction across teams without formal authority, and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform-level roadmap decisions and investment trade-offs.

Grow Engineers: Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, shepherd technical debt reduction and reusable patterns that improve throughput, and raise the technical capability of the wider team.

Lead AI Adoption: Lead team-level adoption of AI-assisted and agentic workflows, including the quality, security, privacy, and operational guardrails, and help engineers direct, validate, reject, and course-correct agent output.

Cross-Team Technical Leadership: A sustained record of technical leadership across more than one team or a broad product area.

Deep Architecture Experience: Deep backend architecture and production experience in complex applications, services, or platforms, including scaling or governing APIs, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components.

Modularization in Production: Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production, and with modular architecture such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, event-driven boundaries, or an equivalent approach.

Influence Without Authority: A strong ability to create alignment through clear written proposals and decision records, so decisions are documented, understood, and adopted without constant escalation.

Product Judgment: The ability to balance customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment.

Mentorship: Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and example.

Agentic AI Leadership: Production experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including the ability to evaluate and improve how a team adopts them.

Go services and APIs at scale.

Kubernetes and cloud-native operations, including deployment, scaling, observability, rollback, and production readiness.

Rust adoption or production ownership for systems, security, performance, or platform components.

Ruby/Rails modularization and large-monolith modernization.

PostgreSQL scaling, data partitioning, queues, messaging, or distributed systems.

Security-sensitive product or software supply chain engineering.

Experience across SaaS, single-tenant, self-managed, or air-gapped deployment constraints.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's 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. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

Benefits 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

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.

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