Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

GitLab; Santa Clara (CA); Remote; CAD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group to collaborate across teams and improve internal tooling for engineering workflows. You will lead initiatives to design reusable onboarding and deployment patterns on Kubernetes, ensuring reliable, scalable platforms for developers.

In this role you will guide architecture decisions, mentor engineers, and partner with security and infrastructure teams to deliver high-impact, production-grade capabilities that accelerate

Job description

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 values and 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. As a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group, you'll work cross-functionally to help us identify and improve the engineering experience across GitLab's internal engineering teams.

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.