Intermediate Backend Engineer
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Intermediate Backend Engineer
About the role
As an Intermediate Backend Engineer, you will take backend features and improvements from clarifying the problem through shipping them and following up in production. You will work within a product area, partnering with Product Management, Frontend, Infrastructure, and Security to deliver predictably and contribute to the quality, security, performance, and maintainability of shared backend code and services. You will be trusted to work with minimal guidance, to know when to seek help, and to communicate clearly in a remote, asynchronous environment - with other tenured engineers alongside you to review your work, think through hard problems with you, and help you grow.
Why you’ll love this role
- Ownership: You'll take features from requirements through delivery and follow-up; your code will run on a platform used by millions of users.
- Learning and Growth : You’ll work alongside your engineering team, who treat code review and design review as a learning loop rather than a gate - one of the fastest ways to grow your engineering judgment.
- Innovative Culture: You’ll use AI as a genuine part of daily engineering work, developing the judgment to know when to trust it and when not to.
- Autonomy: You’ll thrive in our remote-first, asynchronous organization, where clear written communication and self-direction are the pillars of success.
- User-Centric Collaboration: You’ll partner closely with PMs and designers to shape requirements, so you understand why you’re building something, not just what.
What you’ll do
- Own and Ship Features: Design, implement, test, and ship backend features and improvements with minimal guidance, working in Ruby/Rails, Go, or any other modern languages.
- Build for Production: Write maintainable, secure, observable, and performant code. Design and maintain APIs, background jobs, integrations, and bounded service functionality, and work with data models, migrations, indexes, and query behavior.
- Test and Review: Add and improve automated coverage - unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end where appropriate - and review others’ code for correctness, maintainability, security, performance, and operational risk.
- Operate What You Build: Investigate build, test, deployment, and runtime failures at the feature boundary, identify technical debt and propose practical improvements, and take part in on-call or operational support where your team’s ownership model requires it.
- Leverage AI: Use AI productively in daily work, validate what it produces, and understand where its limitations matter.
What you’ll bring
- Backend Fundamentals: Professional experience building and shipping production backend applications, with strong programming, API, database, testing, debugging, and performance fundamentals.
- Adaptability: Experience with Ruby/Rails, Go, or any other modern backend language. We value the ability to learn and adapt over mastery of a single language.
- Feature Ownership: The ability to take a feature from clarification through delivery and follow-up, working independently while seeking input at the right time.
- Practical Judgment: Sound instincts about security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and operational risk, plus an understanding of modular backend boundaries and the consequences of coupling.
- Clear Communication: Strong written communication and effective collaboration in a remote, asynchronous environment.
- AI Fluency: Practical experience with AI coding tools, including the ability to review and correct what they generate.
Helpful experience
- Production Go services, APIs, concurrency, profiling, or gRPC.
- Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, CI/CD, or cloud deployment.
- Rust, particularly for systems, security, performance, or platform work.
- PostgreSQL, schema evolution, caching, queues, messaging, or event-driven workflows.
- Observability using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerts.
- Contributing to a modular monolith, bounded context, shared component, or independently operated service.
How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees
- 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
Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.
Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.
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GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.