Staff Backend Engineer, Secrets Management

Overview of GitLab

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

Our team reflects the principles built into our products: 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, empowering 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

You'll join GitLab's Software Supply Chain Security stage as the Staff Backend Engineer, Secrets Management, providing technical leadership for GitLab's strategic investment in integrated secrets management. You'll set the technical direction for GitLab Secrets Manager, our OpenBao-powered solution that helps customers securely store, distribute, and manage the lifecycle of secrets used across CI/CD pipelines. This role sits at the intersection of the GitLab platform and the OpenBao open source project: you'll drive architecture decisions for multi-tenant secrets management at scale, guide integration into GitLab, and contribute upstream so we can deliver capabilities customers can trust.

In your first year, your success will look like a clear, scalable architecture for GitLab Secrets Manager, reliable performance that meets GitLab.com needs in partnership with Infrastructure teams, and strong cross-team alignment across Pipeline Security, Authentication, and Platform. You'll also represent GitLab in OpenBao's governance and technical discussions, helping ensure our product direction and upstream contributions reinforce each other.

How We Interview

Our process includes technical interviews and stakeholder conversations focused on how you partner across functions and drive alignment.

You should expect questions about how you collaborate with cross-functional partners and communicate tradeoffs in ambiguous, high-impact work.

What You'll Do

• Lead the technical strategy for GitLab Secrets Manager, setting architecture direction for secure, multi-tenant secrets management at scale.
• Own the integration between GitLab and OpenBao, including namespaces, authentication mechanisms, and policy management.
• Collaborate with Pipeline Security, Authentication, and Platform teams to propose, review, and deliver cross-team secrets management improvements.
• Partner with GitLab.com Infrastructure teams to ensure secrets management meets reliability, performance, and operational requirements.
• Represent GitLab in the OpenBao open source project by contributing features upstream, participating in technical steering discussions, and maintaining strong technical credibility.
• Mentor and advise engineers on secrets management, cryptographic systems, and secure architecture patterns, raising the quality and consistency of designs and implementations.
• Interface with engineering managers and senior leadership to scope initiatives, clarify tradeoffs, and unblock delivery across teams.
• Engage with customers and external stakeholders to understand real-world needs and communicate GitLab's secrets management capabilities and roadmap direction.

What You'll Bring

• Experience designing and operating secrets management systems (for example, HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao, or cloud-native offerings), including secure storage, access control, and audit logging.
• Ability to lead architecture decisions for resilient, multi-tenant services that handle secrets operations at scale, including high availability and cluster management patterns.
• Working knowledge of cryptographic and key management concepts, such as encryption in transit and at rest, key derivation, and hardware security module (HSM) or PKCS#11 integrations.
• Experience implementing authentication and authorization integrations, such as JSON Web Token (JWT) or OpenID Connect (OIDC), mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS), and certificate-based authentication.
• Proficiency building product integrations in Go (within the OpenBao or Vault ecosystem) and Ruby on Rails for GitLab platform integration.
• Experience contributing to open source projects and working effectively with distributed governance, balancing upstream needs with product requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to operate with high autonomy, drive strategy, and serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders (including constructively challenging assumptions and tradeoffs).
• Strong communication and collaboration skills to influence across teams and levels, including mentoring engineers and working in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

About The Team

The Secrets Management team sits within the Pipeline Security group in GitLab's Software Supply Chain Security stage. We own GitLab Secrets Manager, an OpenBao-powered capability that helps teams securely store, distribute, and manage the lifecycle of secrets used across continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. The team works closely with Authentication, Authorization, Compliance, and Platform counterparts to deliver secure defaults, reliable operations for GitLab.com, and product-grade integration between GitLab and OpenBao (including namespaces, authentication, and policy management). Our core challenge is building multi-tenant secrets management at scale while balancing upstream open source collaboration with the needs of GitLab customers.

How GitLab Will Support You

• 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

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.

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. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.

Key skills/competency

• Secrets Management
• Software Supply Chain Security
• Backend Engineering
• OpenBao
• HashiCorp Vault
• Cryptography
• Distributed Systems
• Go Programming Language
• Ruby on Rails
• Open Source Contribution