Staff Backend Engineer - AI-Driven Platform Leader

GitLab; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Paid Time Off

Equity Compensation

Growth and Development Fund

Team Member Resource Groups

Parental Leave

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership across multi-team initiatives, drive modular backend architecture, and guide AI-assisted engineering workflows. You will collaborate with Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Engineering Managers to set scale-ready standards and ownership across our production estate.

This remote-first role emphasizes architecture, incident response, and mentoring, with opportunities to influence platform roadmap and

Qualifications

• Cross-team technical leadership across multiple teams or a broad product area.
• Deep backend architecture and production experience in complex applications, services, or platforms.
• Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architectures in production with modular approaches.
• Strong ability to create alignment through clear written proposals and decision records.
• Product judgment balancing customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, and long-term platform investment.
• Mentorship of engineers and shaping standards through code review and documentation.
• Experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and delivery of large backend initiatives that span teams, and identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups.
• Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture. Lead modernization of the monolith toward modular, reusable, independently operated systems.
• Define and improve standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability—and the required build/deploy/release practices.
• Create patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation; guide Go, Kubernetes, and Rust practices as relevant.
• Take part in on-call and incident response for systems owned by teams, acting as escalation point and driving architectural improvements.
• Shape technical direction across teams without formal authority, partnering with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmap decisions.
• Mentor engineers, reduce technical debt, and promote reusable patterns to improve throughput and capability.
• Lead team-level adoption of AI-assisted workflows, including guardrails for safety and privacy.

Skills

Cross-Team Leadership

Backend Architecture

Modular Monoliths

Written Proposals

Product Judgment

Mentorship

AI Leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

Rust

Ruby on Rails

PostgreSQL

Job description

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership across multi-team initiatives, drive modular backend architecture, and guide AI-assisted engineering workflows. You will collaborate with Product, Frontend, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Engineering Managers to set scale-ready standards and ownership across our production estate.

This remote-first role emphasizes architecture, incident response, and mentoring, with opportunities to influence platform roadmap and