Backend Engineer (Ruby), Create: Change Record

An overview of this role

We are looking for a Backend Engineer to join our Change Record team within GitLab’s Source Code stage. As AI agents increasingly write code alongside people, every change needs a clear, trustworthy record of what changed, why, and who or what made it. You’ll build that record into GitLab’s source code experience, for humans and agents alike. This is a backend-focused role for an engineer with full-stack experience who enjoys balancing work on existing systems with new product development.

That work happens in one of GitLab’s oldest and most complex product areas, where you’ll use Ruby on Rails to improve a critical system serving GitLab.com, self-managed instances, and GitLab Dedicated. Source Code provides the interface layer, through Gitaly, to the Git repositories behind a large share of GitLab traffic, so you’ll help keep it reliable through performance tuning, caching, rate limiting, observability, and resiliency, collaborating with product, design, security, Gitaly, Code Review, and Source Code Experience teams. Supporting production systems and improving established experiences are central to the role, especially while you’re onboarding, and over time you’ll also help build experiences for developers working with agents.

You'll work remotely from the United Kingdom or Poland.

What you’ll do

• Develop secure, well-tested, performant features and improvements using Ruby on Rails and GraphQL, among other technologies.
• Work through complex requirements and legacy constraints to deliver clear solutions while protecting the reliability of this critical system.
• Design and maintain backend services, APIs, data models, and business logic that support intuitive source code workflows.
• Collaborate across functions and teams, both asynchronously and synchronously, and involve domain experts when their input will improve the outcome.
• Use AI agents for well-scoped work when they can speed up delivery without sacrificing quality, and critically review their output.
• Write maintainable code that follows GitLab's standards and contribute to constructive code reviews.
• Help strengthen reliability by monitoring production health metrics, participating in Tier 2 on-call, troubleshooting incidents, contributing to root cause analysis, and improving observability and resiliency.
• Share knowledge through code review, technical documentation, and everyday collaboration while learning from others.

What you’ll bring

• Professional experience building backend web applications, services, or application programming interfaces, with experience using Ruby and GraphQL.
• An understanding of relational databases, structured query language, data modeling, caching, background processing, and backend performance practices.
• Experience with full-stack development to build and maintain user-facing workflows and their underlying systems.
• Experience writing backend unit and integration tests, with familiarity with the testing pyramid, Git, and collaborative code review processes.
• Clear written and spoken English communication skills, including sharing useful status updates in a remote, asynchronous environment.
• The ability to manage assigned priorities, work through ambiguity, take ownership of your work, and seek guidance when needed.
• Experience using AI coding agents to speed up software development while critically reviewing their output.
• Bonus: you’ve built agents or agent-based workflows that run in production, not just prototypes.

About the team

The functional team works across Europe and North America, supporting both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. It includes four engineers, comprising both backend and frontend engineers. We work closely with other Source Code teams, Agentic Preview, Repository Services, and Hardening, as well as other teams in the company such as the Gitaly team, and the AI Governance team.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the EU, applicable in the specified country or countries only. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary. 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 and having regard to any applicable collective agreements. The base salary range does not include bonuses, equity, or benefits.

Poland base salary range: 248,000zł - 372,000zł