Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), Production Engineering:Tenant Controls

An overview of this role

At GitLab, our mission is simple: to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world.

As a Senior Backend Engineer on Tenant Controls, you'll design, implement, and evolve backend capabilities for a global platform that millions use. You'll solve problems of high scope and complexity, influence technical and product direction, and improve system quality, reliability, and performance beyond assigned feature work. Working across product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security, you'll make pragmatic architectural trade-offs and partner with product managers and designers to deliver value to users in a remote-first, asynchronous environment.

What you’ll do

• Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, choosing between modular-monolith code, shared components, and independently operated services.
• Influence team objectives, technical direction, and long-range goals, partnering with product managers and designers to shape requirements around user needs.
• Define backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, application programming interfaces (APIs), and operational readiness, advocating for quality, security, availability, and performance.
• Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve delivery practices through code and design reviews.
• Diagnose and prevent performance and reliability issues at scale, participate in incident response, and act as a technical owner where appropriate.
• Experiment with and integrate agentic AI into production engineering workflows, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible use and sound judgment.

What you’ll bring

• Strong command of backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in a complex product or service environment.
• Proficiency in modern backend languages and a deep understanding of systems programming, with the ability to learn and adapt rather than mastery of a single language.
• Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures.
• Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear asynchronous written communication, connecting product needs with technical decisions and directing your own work.
• Experience building or operating agentic AI systems in production, including loops, tool use, and error-handling strategies that support reliability at scale, beyond prompt engineering alone.
• Helpful, but not required: experience with high-throughput distributed systems, concurrency or profiling; containerized production operations (such as Kubernetes); database performance (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, schema evolution or partitioning); large-scale modular monoliths or event-driven systems; public technical communication, open source maintenance or developer-focused software as a service (SaaS).

About the team

You'll join Tenant Controls within Production Engineering, where we own application-level rate limiting on GitLab.com. We build the framework that defines, counts, and observes every application rate limit and migrate existing implementations onto it. Our mission is to give GitLab.com a single way to define, configure, and observe these limits, so operators can understand them during an incident and change them without a deploy.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the EU, applicable in the specified country or countries only. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location and having regard to any applicable collective agreements. The base salary range does not include bonuses, equity, or benefits.

Poland base salary range: 272,000zł - 408.000zł