Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

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.

• Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

As a Staff Backend Engineer in the

• Project Examples In this role, you may lead projects such as:

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Partner with infrastructure and service teams to improve rollout safety, troubleshooting, service health, resource management, and operational visibility across Kubernetes workloads.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a team responsible for developer tooling and internal platform capabilities used by engineering teams to build and operate services.

• Set and execute a roadmap for Kubernetes-based developer workflows, balancing developer experience, platform reliability, security, and operational efficiency.

• Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes, including workloads, networking, configuration and secrets, identity, storage, observability, and progressive delivery.

• Partner with infrastructure, security, and application teams to turn Kubernetes capabilities into simple, well-supported workflows rather than requiring every service team to become a Kubernetes expert.

• Establish engineering standards, documentation, automation, and feedback loops that improve adoption and reduce the time required to bring a service from development to production.

• Coach engineers through architectural decisions, incident follow-up, and production operations while maintaining a clear focus on sustainable team delivery.

• Represent the team with technical and organizational stakeholders, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and use adoption and reliability measures to guide prioritization.

What You'll Bring

• Deep experience building developer tooling, DevEx platforms, testing frameworks, or CI/CD systems at scale.

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building or operating production workloads and platform capabilities, including deployments, services, networking, configuration and secrets, observability, resource management, and troubleshooting.

• Experience designing scalable solutions that improve engineering productivity, test reliability, development environments, or delivery workflows across multiple teams.

• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence without authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, and product functions.

• Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and production operations.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment.

• A product mindset with a passion for empowering developers through simple, reliable, and well-documented workflows.

• Alignment with GitLab values, especially collaboration, iteration, and transparency.

The base salary range for this role's listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. 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. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity . Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range $131,600 - $282,000 USD

• 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.