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An overview of this role
As a Staff Backend Engineer on GitLab's Events & Messaging Platform team, you'll be a foundational technical leader on a high-visibility infrastructure initiative that sits underneath nearly everything GitLab ships. GitLab runs two separate systems for async work today — Sidekiq for short-lived background jobs and a purpose-built event bus for longer-running workflows. This role consolidates both into a single durable, scalable messaging and event-processing platform that powers GitLab's first-party products and underpins third-party integrations like webhooks and external triggers.
You'll bridge architecture and execution — owning the design of a genuinely multi-tenant distributed system, breaking it into work the team can deliver, and solving the hard problems along the way. You'll bring strong instincts around durability, tenant isolation, and horizontal scalability — telling a design that's durable from one that only looks durable under light load — and own reliability end to end. A defining challenge is migrating existing production workloads off the legacy systems without disrupting the traffic they carry.
What you'll do
- Lead technical execution on the CD platform: decompose complex architectural designs into well-scoped, deliverable work and drive the team to ship with quality and confidence.
- Solve high-complexity engineering problems and contribute architectural feedback that shapes how the system evolves.
- Set and maintain the technical bar across the codebase through code review, mentorship, and example.
- Mentor engineers at all levels, helping them grow their technical capabilities and navigate difficult problems.
- Represent the CD team in cross-functional engineering discussions and contribute to written technical proposals and architectural documents.
- Participate in on-call rotations to help ensure GitLab.com availability targets are met.
What you'll bring
- Deep professional experience building backend services in Go, with a track record in high-scale production environments.
- Demonstrated expertise in distributed systems design, including durable workflow execution, state persistence, and event-driven architectures.
- Extensive experience leading or contributing to release orchestration, deployment automation, or continuous delivery systems at scale.
- Extensive hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes at production scale, including progressive delivery patterns such as blue/green and canary deployments.
- Strong familiarity with GitOps workflows and tools in that ecosystem.
- Experience with policy-based governance in software delivery systems.
- Proven ability to translate complex architecture into clear, executable engineering work across a team.
- Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI tools into daily engineering workflows to drive efficiency and quality.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a bias toward async, documentation-first practices.
- Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational judgment and a constructive approach to ambiguity.
Nice to have
- Experience with AI engineering or building AI-integrated product features.
- Ruby on Rails experience.
About the team
The Events & Messaging Platform team is being built out within GitLab's Infrastructure Platforms org to take on one of the most foundational rebuilds on the platform. You'll work closely with the product and integration teams that consume it, shaping your guarantees around what they actually need, in a collaborative, async-first environment where engineers own outcomes. With the platform spanning Self-Managed, Dedicated, and SaaS, you'll reason about reliability across every way GitLab is deployed — a rare chance to define the technical foundation nearly all of GitLab depends on.
How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees
- 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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GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.