Senior Backend Engineer
GitLab
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Overview
Position Type
Full Time
Experience
0+ years
Job Description
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, implement, and evolve product capabilities while solving high-scope backend problems and influencing the technical and product direction of our teams. You will move beyond "assigned work" to actively improve the quality, reliability, and performance of our systems. You will work across product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security boundaries, making sound architectural trade-offs, communicating complex ideas clearly in an asynchronous environment, and helping define the standards for a high-scale, global product.
What you’ll do
- Drive Technical Direction: Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, making pragmatic choices between modular-monolith code, shared components, or independently operated services.
- Raise the Bar: Advocate for product quality, security, availability, and performance. You will define backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, APIs, and operational readiness.
- Mentor & Lead: Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve team delivery practices through code and design reviews.
- Operational Excellence: Diagnose and prevent performance/reliability issues at scale. Participate in incident response and act as a technical owner where appropriate.
- AI Integration: Use AI in production engineering work to improve outcomes, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible, high-judgment use.
What you’ll bring
- Deep Backend Expertise: A strong command of backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in a complex product or service environment.
- Adaptability: Proficiency in modern backend languages and a deep understanding of systems programming. We value the ability to learn and adapt over mastery of a single language.
- Architectural Judgment: Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures.
- Influence: Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear written communication, effectively bridging the gap between product needs and technical reality.
- Agentic AI Expertise: Proven experience building or operating agentic systems in production—moving beyond prompt engineering to architecting loops, tool-use, and error-handling strategies that ensure reliability at scale.
Helpful experience (These are signals, not hard requirements)
- Experience with high-throughput distributed systems, concurrency, or profiling.
- Hands-on experience with containerized production operations (e.g., Kubernetes).
- Deep database performance knowledge (e.g., PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, schema evolution, partitioning).
- Background in large-scale modular monoliths or event-driven systems.
- Public technical communication, open-source maintenance, or experience in developer-focused SaaS.
Salary notes and benefits included in the posting.