Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), Tenant Scale, Geo

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Geo team within the Tenant Scale group at GitLab, you will develop scalable and performant product features for GitLab Replication, Disaster Recovery, and Backup & Restore. You will lead technical initiatives, mentor team members, and learn from customer experiences to support their needs. This role focuses on architectural excellence and iterative delivery of complex technical projects, primarily serving GitLab's largest customers who rely on Geo as a critical part of their workflow.

Must Have

• Design and develop features and improvements to the GitLab Geo product in a secure, well-tested, and performant way, with a focus on architectural excellence
• Work with the Engineering Manager to carefully assess the technical feasibility of feature requests
• Deliver proof-of-concept proposals to help guide technical discussions
• Identify ways to deliver complex technical projects in an iterative fashion
• Take ownership of feature implementation
• Lead architectural design decisions and drive technical strategy for complex system challenges
• Mentor junior engineers and guide their technical development within the team
• Provide technical advice to the Customer Support team to resolve requests from customers
• Extensive professional experience with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL
• Experience designing and building fault-tolerant, distributed systems
• Experience building and scaling highly available systems
• Experience with queueing and messaging systems
• Experience with provisioning tools

Good to Have

• Experience working with tools for backup and restore of databases, app configuration, and infrastructure as code for large distributed applications

Perks & Benefits

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental leave
• Home office support

GitLab is an open-core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating human progress. Our platform unites teams and organizations, breaking down barriers and redefining what's possible in software development. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise and Duo Agent Platform, customers get AI benefits at every stage of the SDLC.

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on our Geo team within the Tenant Scale group, you will drive the development of scalable and performant product features for three distinct product categories: GitLab Replication, Disaster Recovery, and Backup & Restore. You will lead technical initiatives, mentor team members, and actively learn from the customer experience to guide the team in supporting customer needs. These could take the form of bug reports or feature requests. Geo users are often GitLab's largest customers, and many rely on Geo as a critical part of their workflow.

Some examples of our projects

• Geo Proxy
• Geo Self-Service Framework
• Geo-based Runner Acceleration

What you'll do

• Design and develop features and improvements to the GitLab Geo product in a secure, well-tested, and performant way, with a focus on architectural excellence
• Work with the Engineering Manager to carefully assess the technical feasibility of feature requests
• Deliver proof-of-concept proposals to help guide technical discussions
• Identify ways to deliver complex technical projects in an iterative fashion
• Take ownership of feature implementation
• Lead architectural design decisions and drive technical strategy for complex system challenges
• Mentor junior engineers and guide their technical development within the team
• Provide technical advice to the Customer Support team to resolve requests from customers

What you'll bring

• Extensive professional experience with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL
• Experience designing and building fault-tolerant, distributed systems
• Experience building and scaling highly available systems
• Experience with queueing and messaging systems
• Experience with provisioning tools
• Considered a plus is to have experience working with tools for backup and restore of databases, app configuration, and infrastructure as code for large distributed applications
• Experience mentoring and leading engineers, and establishing technical best practices

About the team

GitLab Geo is an enterprise product feature, built to distribute GitLab self-hosted deployments to different geographic locations. This is achieved by replicating the entire GitLab dataset to new locations in a coordinated, consistent, and scalable manner. Data can be accessed from any of the locations, whilst intelligent proxying techniques guarantee users have access to the most recent data.

Geo's architecture addresses a number of customer problems that include acceleration of proximity-based data access and disaster recovery.