Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience Platform

GitLab; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 99,000 - 213,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits package

Flexible PTO

Equity compensation

Growth & development fund

Parental leave

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group to help us improve engineering tooling and internal platforms across distributed teams. You will split time between hands-on Ruby/Go coding and shaping scalable, secure developer workflows in production Kubernetes environments.

This high-visibility role requires technical leadership, strong communication in a remote-first setting, and the ability to drive adoption through reliable tooling, documentation, and integrated

Qualifications

• Extensive 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 services; contributions to Ruby-based systems are a plus.
• Practical Kubernetes experience in production workloads, including deployments, networking, observability, and troubleshooting.
• Deep knowledge of Helm-based deployments, multi-cluster contexts, and integrating third-party operators.
• Ability to lead technically across engineering, infrastructure, security, and product functions.
• Strong written and verbal communication in a remote-first environment.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Developer tooling

DevEx platforms

CI/CD systems

Go

Ruby (contributions)

Kubernetes

Platform tooling

Technical leadership

Tools

Helm

Terraform

Docker

Job description

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group to help us improve engineering tooling and internal platforms across distributed teams. You will split time between hands-on Ruby/Go coding and shaping scalable, secure developer workflows in production Kubernetes environments.

This high-visibility role requires technical leadership, strong communication in a remote-first setting, and the ability to drive adoption through reliable tooling, documentation, and integrated