# Staff Backend Engineer

**Company:** [GitLab](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/gitlab)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $153k – $259k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Go, Kubernetes, Rust, Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Distributed Systems, APIs, Event-Driven Architecture, Ai-Assisted Workflows, Cloud-Native Operations, Observability, Incident Response
**Posted:** 2026-09-02

> Provides cross-team technical leadership for large backend initiatives, modular architecture, production operations, and AI-assisted engineering adoption. The role requires deep backend architecture experience, monolith modernization expertise, strong written influence, and mentoring ability.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Lead the technical design and delivery of large, cross-cutting backend initiatives spanning multiple teams.
- Identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups.
- Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture, including modernization of monolithic and legacy backends.
- Define standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, maintainability, and production readiness.
- Establish patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation.
- Define Go service patterns and Kubernetes operating practices; guide Rust adoption where appropriate.
- Participate in on-call and incident response, serve as a technical escalation point, and implement improvements to prevent recurrence.
- Shape technical direction across teams and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on roadmaps and investment trade-offs.
- Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers and improve technical capability across the organization.
- Lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows, including quality, security, privacy, and operational guardrails.

## Requirements
- Sustained technical leadership across multiple teams or a broad product area.
- Deep backend architecture and production experience with complex applications, services, or platforms.
- Experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production.
- Experience with modular architecture, such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, or event-driven boundaries.
- Ability to build alignment through clear written proposals and decision records.
- Strong product judgment balancing customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and platform investment.
- Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and example.
- Production experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows.

## Nice-to-haves
- Go services and APIs at scale.
- Kubernetes and cloud-native operations, including deployment, scaling, observability, rollback, and production readiness.
- Rust adoption or production ownership for systems, security, performance, or platform components.
- Ruby on Rails modularization and large-monolith modernization.
- PostgreSQL scaling, data partitioning, queues, messaging, or distributed systems.
- Security-sensitive product or software supply chain engineering.
- Experience with SaaS, single-tenant, self-managed, or air-gapped deployment constraints.

## Compensation and Benefits
- United States base salary: **$152,800–$259,200 USD**.
- Benefits include flexible paid time off, health and well-being support, equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan, growth and development funding, parental leave, and team member resource groups.

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