Senior Backend Engineer , Tenant Scale: Gitaly
Build and operate GitLab’s large-scale Git storage tier, leading distributed systems initiatives across design, rollout, reliability, and incident response. The role requires significant production experience with backend or systems languages, strong systems design skills, and experience owning complex projects end to end.
About the job
Responsibilities
- 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 driving execution.
- Lead technical design for distributed storage, Git repository management, performance, reliability, and scalability problems using data and benchmarking.
- Partner with GitLab engineering, infrastructure, site reliability, dedicated, and customer-facing teams on cross-functional outcomes.
- Improve engineering practices through mentoring, documentation, knowledge sharing, design reviews, and code reviews.
- Take operational ownership, including incident response, post-incident improvements, capacity and performance analysis, and customer escalations.
- Improve automation, reusable designs, dashboards, upstream contributions, development workflows, and testing.
- Respond to user emergencies, platform alerts, and support requests, including regular on-call duties.
Requirements
- 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 covering performance, failure modes, consistency, concurrency, capacity, and observability.
- Experience influencing technical decisions and collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders.
- Experience mentoring engineers and improving design, code, testing, and documentation quality.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Professional experience with Go or another backend or systems language.
- Experience operating production systems and participating in incident response.
Nice-to-haves
- Ruby experience.
- Git internals experience.
- gRPC experience.
- Git server infrastructure experience.
Compensation & Benefits
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
Skills
Go, Ruby, Git, gRPC, Git Internals, Distributed Systems, System Design, Distributed Storage, Git Repository Management, High Availability, Observability, Incident Response, Performance Optimization, Concurrency, Capacity Planning
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