Senior Software Engineer , Security Platform: Authorization
Senior Software Engineer responsible for evolving GitLab’s authorization model across its Ruby on Rails monolith and next-generation policy engine. The role requires production Rails experience, authorization expertise, security judgment, API knowledge, and strong written communication.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design and ship authorization changes in GitLab’s Ruby on Rails monolith, including high-volume permission checks.
- Own workstreams from problem definition through feature-flagged rollout, dual-run verification, and cleanup.
- Build and extend fine-grained permissions for tokens and roles while maintaining a coherent permission catalog.
- Extend and strengthen authorization enforcement across GraphQL and REST APIs.
- Refactor policy code so the monolith and authorization engine can evaluate it consistently without changing existing behavior.
- Improve reliability, performance, and security of authorization systems and reduce permission-model debt.
- Partner with authentication, platform, AI, and modular-service teams on authorization interface contracts.
- Document technical decisions through design documents, architecture decision records, and code reviews in an asynchronous organization.
Requirements
- Significant experience building and operating production Ruby on Rails applications.
- Experience designing or implementing authorization systems, including role-based access control and fine-grained permissions.
- Strong security mindset, including assessment of permission bugs and blast radius.
- Experience making careful changes to large, long-lived codebases through incremental refactoring, feature flags, and behavior-preserving migrations.
- Working knowledge of GraphQL and API authorization patterns.
- Understanding of performance at scale, including the impact of repeated uncached checks.
- Strong written communication for document- and merge-request-based collaboration.
Nice-to-haves
- Rust
- gRPC
- Protocol Buffers
- Cedar or other policy languages
- Zanzibar-style authorization systems
- Go
- Service-oriented architecture
- Transferable experience in identity, policy engines, or platform security
Compensation and Benefits
- United States base salary range: $139,200–$235,200 USD.
- Benefits include flexible paid time off, team member resource groups, equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan, growth and development fund, and parental leave.
Skills
Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Authorization, Role-Based Access Control, GraphQL, REST APIs, Rust, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Cedar, Go, Zanzibar, Feature Flags, Yaml
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