Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience
Leads cross-functional Developer Experience initiatives across GitLab, combining hands-on Ruby and Go development with technical leadership to improve testing, CI/CD pipelines, tooling, and engineering workflows. The role requires deep developer tooling experience and the ability to influence multiple teams.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Provide hands-on engineering contributions and technical leadership across six Developer Experience teams.
- Partner with engineering teams to identify pain points and translate feedback into roadmap improvements.
- Modernize testing approaches and build fast, reliable testing tools at scale.
- Optimize CI/CD workflows to reduce merge friction and provide actionable feedback.
- Collaborate with Platform, Product, and Infrastructure teams to eliminate architectural and process bottlenecks.
- Foster continuous learning, inclusion, and improvement across the engineering organization.
Requirements
- Deep experience with developer tooling, Developer Experience strategies, and testing frameworks at scale.
- Experience leading platform or transformation initiatives across multiple teams.
- Ability to influence without authority and collaborate across functions.
- Familiarity with DevOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment.
- Product mindset and passion for empowering developers.
- Alignment with collaboration, iteration, and transparency.
Compensation & Benefits
- United States base salary: $131,600–$282,000 USD.
- Benefits include health, financial, and well-being support; flexible paid time off; team member resource groups; equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan; growth and development fund; and parental leave.
Skills
Ruby, Go, Developer Tooling, Developer Experience, Testing Frameworks, DevOps, CI/CD, Test Coverage, Logging Libraries, Development Environments
Similar jobs
Backend Engineering jobs
Nango
United StatesStaff Backend Software Engineer responsible for designing and scaling developer infrastructure, APIs, and backend services while shaping product direction and collaborating directly with customers. Requires extensive backend experience, Node.js proficiency, and a strong focus on developer experience.
Kong
San Francisco, CAArchitects and leads development of Kong Identity’s globally distributed, multi-tenant identity platform, including token management, federation, security, compliance, and developer tooling. Requires 7+ years building production identity systems and deep expertise in modern identity protocols and high-scale infrastructure.
MongoDB
San Francisco, CA
Staff-level engineer shaping the architecture and technical direction of MongoDB’s Search and Vector Search infrastructure. The role requires 10+ years in data management or distributed infrastructure, strong distributed-systems expertise, and the ability to lead complex cross-team initiatives.
Docker
United StatesLeads ambiguous, cross-team backend and developer-experience initiatives while remaining hands-on with distributed services, data pipelines and platform evolution. Requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, production-system leadership, strong operational judgment and the ability to work across unfamiliar technologies.
GitLab
United StatesBuild and operate Go-based automation and a PostgreSQL-as-a-service platform for high-throughput, always-on production systems. The role requires deep PostgreSQL production experience, backend development expertise, infrastructure automation, and staff-level technical leadership.