Backend Engineer, Database Excellence

Overview of the Backend Engineer, Database Excellence Role at GitLab

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer in the Database Excellence group at GitLab, you will play a crucial role in developing and enhancing the frameworks, patterns, and tooling essential for maintaining the scalability, health, and safety of GitLab's application datastores. This includes supporting both GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed instances. You will collaborate closely with experienced engineers and cross-functional teams to build reliable backend features, learn best practices in data architecture and lifecycle management, and contribute significantly to identifying and addressing performance improvements within our infrastructure. As a key member of the Data Engineering organization, you will gain hands-on experience with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails within an all-remote, highly collaborative environment, benefiting from mentorship to grow your skills in data scalability and system design.

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, trusted by over 50 million registered users. Our team embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier, expecting all members to integrate AI into daily workflows for efficiency, innovation, and impact.

What You'll Do

• Develop and iterate backend features and data frameworks to ensure safe and efficient data operations at scale across GitLab.com and self-managed deployments.
• Collaborate with product management, UX, frontend, infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics teams to design and ship high-performing, reliable solutions.
• Review and improve database-related changes from other engineers and external contributors, ensuring data integrity, safety, and performance across diverse environments.
• Design, build, and maintain essential tooling, such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks, to proactively detect and address scalability and performance issues.
• Research, design, and implement enhancements to database performance, scalability, and data health, covering areas like soft delete strategies and database migration testing.
• Document database best practices, anti-patterns, and data architecture guidance to empower developers to make informed, consistent decisions.
• Create proactive tooling and guardrails that assist developers in detecting and remediating potential performance and data issues early in the development lifecycle.

What You'll Bring

• Professional software engineering experience working with PostgreSQL in large, complex production environments, including proficiency in performance tuning and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails or another Ruby framework, coupled with experience in designing, implementing, and reviewing backend features and services.
• Ability to reason effectively about software design, algorithms, and performance trade-offs at a system level, particularly in data-intensive applications.
• Strong written communication skills and comfort working asynchronously in an all-remote, distributed team environment.
• A self-directed work style complemented by effective organizational skills and the ability to manage priorities autonomously as a "manager of one."
• Alignment with GitLab's core values, including transparency, collaboration, inclusion, and a commitment to open source practices.
• Openness to learning and applying new tools and approaches, with transferable experience from related data, infrastructure, or developer tooling domains being a plus.

About The Database Excellence Team

The Database Excellence Group is a remote, agile backend team within the Data Engineering organization. We are responsible for building and maintaining the frameworks, patterns, and tooling that empower GitLab teams to work confidently with data at scale across all application datastores. Our focus areas include data scalability, health, and developer enablement for both GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed deployments. We partner closely with infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics stages to ensure data changes are safe, performant, and compatible across diverse environments. We are independent, self-organized contributors who collaborate asynchronously across regions, and we are expanding our mission to proactively identify saturation points and deliver new scalability features and data health initiatives for self-managed customers.

Key skills/competency

• PostgreSQL
• Ruby on Rails
• Backend Engineering
• Database Scalability
• Performance Tuning
• Data Architecture
• System Design
• Distributed Systems
• Data Integrity
• Asynchronous Communication