Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), AI Catalog: External Agents

GitLab; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design and build integrations that bring GitLab agents into tools and connect external AI solutions. You’ll own complex features end-to-end and shape how GitLab exposes its AI capabilities to internal and external users.

You’ll work across product, UX, frontend, backend, and AI specialists to deliver high-quality improvements, with a strong emphasis on secure backend design, testing, and scalable APIs in a remote-first environment.

Qualifications

• Experience building and maintaining production applications with Ruby on Rails.
• Proficiency in designing or extending REST or GraphQL APIs with scalability in mind.
• Strong SQL skills and familiarity with PostgreSQL.
• Experience identifying performance bottlenecks and optimizing code paths.
• Ability to collaborate asynchronously in a distributed team and learn new tech quickly.

Responsibilities

• Develop, ship, and maintain secure, well-tested, and performant external agent integrations across the GitLab monolith backend.
• Collaborate with Product Management, UX, frontend, backend, and AI specialists to refine requirements and deliver improvements.
• Design, implement, and review GraphQL and REST APIs with clear contracts for frontend clients.
• Improve automated testing, including RSpec and other frameworks, to strengthen quality and feedback loops.
• Share standards and patterns for responsible AI integration across the team.
• Participate in Tier 2 on-call rotations, troubleshoot production issues, and contribute to root cause analysis.
• Assess the competitive landscape and help GitLab build strong AI integrations as agentic tech evolves.

Skills

Ruby on Rails

SQL

REST APIs

GraphQL APIs

Performance optimization

Distributed teamwork

Tools

PostgreSQL

RSpec

Vue

Python

Job description

Remote, United Kingdom

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our valuesand continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

*Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on GitLab’s External Agents team, you’ll design and build integrations that bring GitLab agents into tools such as Slack and connect external solutions such as Claude Code or Codex with GitLab. You’ll take end-to-end ownership of complex features, help shape architectural patterns for how GitLab exposes its AI functionality, and collaborate with engineers across the Agent Foundations stage and adjacent AI engineering teams. This is a high-visibility area at the intersection of GitLab’s core platform and AI strategy.

What you’ll do

• Develop, ship, and maintain secure, well-tested, and performant external agent integrations across the GitLab monolith backend.
• Collaborate with Product Management, user experience, frontend, backend, and AI specialists to refine requirements and deliver high-quality improvements iteratively.
• Design, implement, and review GraphQL and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and related backend logic, with clear contracts for frontend clients.
• Improve and extend automated testing, including RSpec and other frameworks, to strengthen quality, reliability, and developer feedback loops.
• Share standards, patterns, and lessons with other engineers to support responsible AI integration and evidence-based engineering across the team.
• Participate in Tier 2 on-call rotations , troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve observability and resiliency.
• Assess the competitive landscape and help GitLab build strong AI integrations as agentic technology evolves.

What you’ll bring

• Experience building and maintaining production applications with Ruby on Rails, including background jobs, APIs, and data models.
• Comfort working across the stack in a mature codebase.
• Proficiency in designing or extending REST or GraphQL APIs with attention to scalability, maintainability, and backward compatibility.
• Practical experience designing and shipping AI-powered backend features or integrations.
• Strong SQL skills and familiarity with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including efficient queries and data modeling.
• Experience identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks at the application and, where relevant, infrastructure layers.
• Openness to learning, collaborating in an asynchronous, distributed team, and applying transferable skills from related technologies or domains; familiarity with Python backends or Vue frontends is a plus.

About the team

External Agents is a functional team within the AI Catalog group . We will initially consist of three engineers across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) time zones, while the wider AI Catalog group includes more than eight engineers across Asia-Pacific (APAC), EMEA, and the Americas (AMER). Other teams in AI Catalog focus on agent creation and curation. Together, we partner with teams across AI engineering and GitLab to help the GitLab Duo Agent Platform become the backbone for AI features across the product.

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.

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.

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 alsoGitLab’s EEO Policy andEEO is the Law . If you have a disability or special need that requiresaccommodation , please let us know during therecruiting process .