From the listing
About the role
GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million users and 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.
As a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group, you’ll work cross-functionally to identify and improve the engineering experience across GitLab’s internal engineering teams. This is a highly visible role focused on transforming testing approaches and development workflows to enable high-quality code delivery.
The Developer Experience group consists of six globally distributed teams. You will split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions, and shaping engineering culture toward a cohesive Developer Experience Platform strategy.
What you'll do
- Lead and grow a team responsible for developer tooling and internal platform capabilities.
- Set and execute a roadmap for Kubernetes-based developer workflows, balancing experience, reliability, and security.
- Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes.
- Make environment bring-up and teardown deterministic by resolving readiness and ordering dependencies between CRDs and controllers.
- Partner with infrastructure, security, and application teams to simplify Kubernetes capabilities into well-supported workflows.
- Establish engineering standards, documentation, automation, and feedback loops to reduce time to production.
- Coach engineers through architectural decisions, incident follow-up, and production operations.
- Represent the team with technical and organizational stakeholders and use reliability measures to guide prioritization.
What they're looking for
- Deep experience building developer tooling, DevEx platforms, testing frameworks, or CI/CD systems at scale.
- Strong hands-on Go experience designing, implementing, and operating production-quality services or platform tooling.
- Practical Kubernetes experience building or operating production workloads, including networking, configuration, and troubleshooting.
- Depth in Kubernetes deployment lifecycle, including Helm-based management, multi-cluster context handling, and integrating third-party operators.
- Experience designing scalable solutions that improve engineering productivity or delivery workflows across multiple teams.
- Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence without authority across functions.
- Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and release automation.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment.
- A product mindset with a passion for empowering developers through simple workflows.
Nice to have
- Experience contributing to Ruby-based systems.
- Experience authoring a Kubernetes controller or operator.
From the company page
Gitlab benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“We've scaled as an asynchronous, no-office company that's consistently recognized as a great place to work.”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on Gitlab
GitLab has put more effort into their employee marketing and policies than 99.99% of the companies we've researched over the years. Seriously, their handbook is absolutely massive.
The ONLY thing that throws me off about them is an unclear statement about their stance on what "work from anywhere" actually means. They say:
"All-remote means that each individual in an organization is empowered to work and live where they are most fulfilled."
But they also say that hey need to have an entity in your home country in order to be hired, so I'd love to know if they have a list of the countries they will hire from.