Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

Developer Experience currently has six, globally distributed teams of Backend Engineers and Software Engineers in Test. This role will work across the entire group to help us identify and remove the biggest points of friction that affect development at GitLab. Expect to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions and helping every team deliver. You’ll be instrumental in shaping our engineering culture across GitLab.

This is a highly visible role with strong company-wide support. You’ll be instrumental in shifting our culture and practices toward a cohesive Developer Experience Platform strategy—backed by buy-in and appetite for change.

SOME EXAMPLES OF OUR PROJECTS

• Project Examples

In this role, you may lead projects such as:

• Internal developer platform adoption: Build and evolve platform capabilities that make it easier for engineering teams to create, deploy, operate, and scale services on Kubernetes.
• Kubernetes-based service onboarding: Define reusable service templates, deployment workflows, configuration patterns, and operational guardrails for teams adopting the platform.
• Developer workflows and test environments: Build development, CI, and test environments that reflect production Kubernetes behavior — including third-party operators and the custom resources services depend on — sequencing CRD establishment, controller readiness, and dependent workloads so engineers get a working environment rather than a partially reconciled one, across both local and remote clusters.
• Platform reliability and observability: Partner with infrastructure and service teams to improve rollout safety, troubleshooting, service health, resource management, and operational visibility across Kubernetes workloads.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a team responsible for developer tooling and internal platform capabilities used by engineering teams to build and operate services.
• Set and execute a roadmap for Kubernetes-based developer workflows, balancing developer experience, platform reliability, security, and operational efficiency.
• Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes, including workloads, networking, configuration and secrets, identity, storage, observability, progressive delivery, and the custom resources and controllers that services depend on.
• Make environment bring-up and teardown deterministic — resolving readiness and ordering dependencies between CRDs, controllers, and the workloads that rely on them — so engineers get reproducible environments instead of intermittent failures.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and application teams to turn Kubernetes capabilities into simple, well-supported workflows rather than requiring every service team to become a Kubernetes expert.
• Establish engineering standards, documentation, automation, and feedback loops that improve adoption and reduce the time required to bring a service from development to production.
• Coach engineers through architectural decisions, incident follow-up, and production operations while maintaining a clear focus on sustainable team delivery.
• Represent the team with technical and organizational stakeholders, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and use adoption and reliability measures to guide prioritization.

What You'll Bring

• Deep experience building developer tooling, DevEx platforms, testing frameworks, or CI/CD systems at scale.
• Strong hands-on Go experience designing, implementing, testing, and operating production-quality services, command-line tools, automation, or platform tooling. Experience contributing to Ruby-based systems is also valuable for this role.
• Practical Kubernetes experience building or operating production workloads and platform capabilities, including deployments, services, networking, configuration and secrets, observability, resource management, and troubleshooting.
• Depth in Kubernetes deployment lifecycle: Helm-based deployment and release management, kubeconfig and multi-cluster context handling including deploying into clusters you don't own, and integrating third-party operators and their custom resources (CloudNativePG, cert-manager and similar) into working environments — including the readiness and ordering problems that come with them: waiting on CRD establishment, controller availability, and custom resources reaching their own definition of ready. Experience authoring a controller or operator is useful but not required.
• Experience designing scalable solutions that improve engineering productivity, test reliability, development environments, or delivery workflows across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence without authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, and product functions.
• Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and production operations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment.
• A product mindset with a passion for empowering developers through simple, reliable, and well-documented workflows.
• Alignment with GitLab values, especially collaboration, iteration, and transparency.

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.

United States Salary Range $131,600—$282,000 USD

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.

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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.