Senior Backend Engineer, Development Health

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on Development Health, you'll help make the systems that engineering teams rely on more reliable, maintainable, and easier to extend. You'll build and improve the automation, tooling, and data that help teams spot problems early and ship with less friction.

As customer zero for GitLab, we support engineering workflows on GitLab's own product at scale. You'll use the product in demanding, real-world ways, surface the friction and gaps you find, and contribute to improvements that get built into the product for GitLab's customers.

You'll support work such as:

• Health alerting and remediation routing for GitLab's core continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines
• Flaky and slow test detection systems
• Engineering analytics and reporting that engineering teams use to make decisions

What you’ll do

• Own and evolve core Development Health systems, from design through production.
• Improve the reliability, maintainability, and test coverage of long-lived automation, and reduce reliance on undocumented knowledge by documenting and simplifying legacy systems.
• Partner with engineering managers and product teams to identify workflow pain points and turn them into well-scoped, measurable improvements.
• Work with data to show whether changes improve engineering health, and use it to prioritize.
• Mentor intermediate engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing.
• Communicate clearly in writing and asynchronously, including status, tradeoffs, and proposals for stakeholders across Engineering.
• Monitor the health of production systems, troubleshoot incidents, and contribute to root cause analysis.
• Use artificial intelligence (AI) agents and assistants to analyze issues and problem areas to help shape the team's product roadmap.

What you’ll bring

• Substantial experience as a backend or tooling engineer, with a track record of owning production systems end to end.
• Strong proficiency in Ruby, or the ability to become productive quickly.
• Experience maintaining or modernizing legacy codebases safely.
• Comfort with CI/CD systems, application programming interfaces (APIs), and automation at scale.
• Independent problem-solving and clear, concise written communication: you spot problems early, raise risks proactively, and drive work to completion without close direction.
• Experience writing automated unit and integration tests and taking part in collaborative code review.
• Experience using AI coding assistants to speed up development while critically reviewing their output.
• Optional experience: Rails; developer productivity, engineering analytics, or internal tooling; GitLab's product and open source contribution workflow; data pipelines or metrics reporting; or agent-based workflows that run in production.

About the team

Development Health is part of Developer Experience. Our work is mostly internal, and our customers are GitLab team members across an engineering organization of hundreds of engineers.

We're all-remote, asynchronous by default, and documentation-driven, in line with GitLab's values of collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity, inclusion and belonging, iteration, and transparency.