Senior Backend Engineer (Go), Tenant Scale: Gitaly

GitLab; United States; Remote; USD 69,000 - 104,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Equity compensation

Growth and Development Fund

Parental Leave

Job summary

GitLab Inc. is seeking an experienced Backend Engineer for the Gitaly team to advance the Git data storage tier, ensuring fast, secure, and reliable repository access across GitLab.com and customers. You’ll shape design, performance, and reliability while collaborating with multiple teams in a remote, high-impact role.

You will balance roadmap delivery with operational support, mentoring, and continuous improvement, contributing to the next generation of SCM technologies at scale.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building distributed or highly available software systems.
• Track record managing complex projects end to end with design, rollout and ops.
• Strong systems design, performance, concurrency, and observability.
• Ability to influence decisions and work across teams.
• Mentoring engineers and improving team practices.
• Clear written and spoken communication.

Responsibilities

• Own medium to large technical initiatives from scoping to rollout and post-incident follow-up.
• Lead design for distributed storage, Git repository management, and scalability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver outcomes.
• Improve engineering practices through reviews and documentation.
• Take on operational ownership including incident response and escalations.
• Drive automation and dashboard improvements across systems.
• Respond to platform alerts and support requests with on-call duties.

Skills

Go language

Ruby

Git internals

gRPC

Distributed systems

Incident response

Code reviews

Go tooling

Tools

Git

Job description

Location: Poland

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 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. 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 Backend Engineer on the Gitaly team, you’ll help build GitLab’s Git data storage tier, a standalone product that provides reliable, secure, and fast access to Git repositories through application programming interfaces (APIs) and storage operations. You’ll work at the boundary between GitLab and Git to make repository access performant and dependable for GitLab.com, self-managed customers, and GitLab Dedicated. Our work spans distributed storage, repository management, high availability, performance, observability, and operational excellence. We’re currently building the next generation of source code management (SCM), including new approaches to scaling Git storage and improving how repository data is managed and served.

You’ll balance roadmap delivery, technical improvements, customer and reliability work, and operational support. We value pragmatic engineering, thoughtful trade-offs, continuous improvement, and sustainable ways of working while operating a service that’s critical to GitLab. Learn more on the Gitaly Team Page.

What you’ll do

• Own moderately sized to complex technical initiatives from problem definition and proposal through implementation, rollout, monitoring, and operational follow-through.
• Act as the directly responsible individual for projects by aligning stakeholders, communicating progress and trade-offs, identifying risks, and keeping execution moving with minimal guidance.
• Lead technical design for distributed storage, Git repository management, performance, reliability, and scalability problems, using data and benchmarking to guide decisions.
• Partner with engineers and teams across GitLab, including Git, Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Dedicated, and customer-facing teams, to deliver cross-functional outcomes.
• Improve engineering practices through mentoring, documentation, knowledge sharing, design reviews, and constructive code reviews.
• Take operational ownership of the systems you work on, including incident response, post-incident improvements, capacity and performance analysis, and customer escalations.
• Identify opportunities to improve work beyond an individual change through automation, reusable designs, better dashboards, upstream contributions, and improvements to development and testing workflows.
• Respond to user emergencies, platform alerts, and support requests, including regular on-call duties.

What you’ll bring

• Significant professional experience building, debugging, and optimizing distributed or highly available software systems in large-scale production environments.
• Experience owning complex projects end to end, including technical design, execution, rollout, and operational support.
• Strong systems design skills and the ability to reason about performance, failure modes, consistency, concurrency, capacity, and observability.
• A track record of influencing technical decisions and working effectively with stakeholders across teams and disciplines.
• Experience mentoring engineers, improving team practices, and raising the quality of designs, code, testing, and documentation.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts and make trade-offs clear.
• Professional experience with Go or another backend or systems language.
• Experience operating production systems, participating in incident response, and turning operational learnings into durable improvements.
• Experience with Ruby, Git internals, gRPC, or Git server infrastructure is highly desirable.

About the team

The Gitaly team includes Backend Engineers who share ownership of the product’s design, implementation, reliability, and customer outcomes. We work autonomously while collaborating closely through design discussions, code reviews, incident response, documentation, and asynchronous communication. Engineers are encouraged to take ownership as directly responsible individuals, seek input early, make decisions transparently, and share knowledge across the team. Learn more on the Gitaly Team Page.

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: 272,000 - 408,000 PLN

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.

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.