Intermediate Backend Engineer, GitLab
Verify: Runner Core
+ Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
More information about location
One DevOps platform
Be an early applicant
One DevOps platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
+ Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make it so that everyone can contribute. When everyone can contribute, users become contributors and we greatly increase the rate of innovation.
Role
Who you are
- Proficiency in developing backend services in Go and applying Go best practices in production, whether gained through professional work, open-source contributions, or other hands-on experience
- Ability to design and build scalable, distributed, and resilient systems that can grow with increasing demand, ideally with exposure to high-throughput CI pipelines, job orchestration, or similar infrastructure
- Hands-on skills with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, including deploying and operating services that run CI workloads across diverse environments
- Ability to analyze, profile, and optimize performance in distributed systems using appropriate tools and observability data, especially for latency-sensitive and resource-intensive CI execution paths
- Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure (for example, a major cloud provider or infrastructure-as-code tools) and concepts related to site reliability and operating SaaS platforms that run large-scale CI
- Comfort with asynchronous communication and proactive written updates, essential for collaborating effectively across a globally distributed team
- Strong collaboration skills, including working closely with other engineers, contributing to shared technical practices, participating in code reviews, and communicating clearly with cross-functional partners like Product and 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
What the job involves
- As an Intermediate Backend Engineer on our Verify: Runner Core group within the Verify: Runner organization, you'll help build and evolve GitLab Runner, the interface between GitLab and our customers' CI infrastructure. Whether jobs run on Kubernetes clusters, cloud VMs, or on-premises hardware, GitLab Runner makes it happen. Each week, Runners process millions of jobs for GitLab.com, and our container images are downloaded hundreds of millions of times
- You'll collaborate on technical initiatives and contribute to design and implementation, taking on work that matches your experience while growing your impact over time
- You'll learn from how customers use our CI/CD capabilities and use that insight to help the team solve real-world scaling and reliability challenges. This input can come from bug reports, customer escalations, or feedback on executor behavior and performance. GitLab Runner users often have demanding CI/CD requirements, and many rely on the infrastructure you help build as a mission-critical part of their software delivery workflows
- Here's a glimpse of some of the things we're working on and where we're headed:
- Job Routing: Transforming GitLab Runner's job scheduling from HTTP polling to intelligent, server-mediated routing that enables runner prioritization, admission control, and distributed autoscaling coordination
- We've already kicked this off with Admission Control, and you could contribute to its iteration
- Externalizing CI: Transforming GitLab CI from static YAML configuration to dynamic, programmable pipelines where jobs can create other jobs at runtime
- Job Volume Mounts: Enabling CI jobs to mount GitLab repositories and artifacts as filesystem volumes, providing instant, lightweight access to multi-repository content without full git clones
- Design and develop features and improvements for GitLab Runner that are secure, well-tested, and high-performance, with a focus on strong architecture in Go services, appropriate for an intermediate-level engineer
- Partner with the Product Manager and other Senior Engineers to assess the technical feasibility and scope of Runner-related feature requests, contributing your perspective and asking clarifying questions
- Contribute to architectural decisions that modernize Runner's technology stack, favoring solutions that address root causes over fixes that treat symptoms
- Take end-to-end ownership of your features from design through implementation, code review, deployment, monitoring, and iterative refinement
- Collaborate closely with other engineers on the team and within the Runner Organization through code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing, both learning from others and helping raise the overall technical bar
- Work with cross-functional partners, including Support and Product, to help diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve customer issues related to GitLab Runner and CI Functions, and feed those learnings back into the product
- Engage with GitLab Runner's vibrant open-source community by triaging bug reports, reviewing community-contributed merge requests, and helping contributors succeed
- Participate in team rotations including bug triage, community contribution reviews, and support escalation response
- The Verify: Runner Core team at GitLab sits within the Verify: Runner organization and is responsible for GitLab Runner. We focus on Runner's core architecture, executor implementations, scalability, and reliability. The team operates across multiple time zones, so async communication is core to how we work
- We work closely with the CI Functions Platform team, within the Runner organization. The two teams collaborate regularly and share roadmap initiatives. This close partnership means you'll have opportunities to contribute to work that affects both teams
Our take
GitLab is an open-source collaboration platform for developers. It enables teams to build code quickly from anywhere without compromising on security or quality. GitLab already has an estimated 30M+ users from all over the world.
According to a 2021 GitLab report, 60% of developers can release code 2x faster with DevOps platforms that bring teams together and accelerate processes. It stands out by catering to programmers of all experiences. Gitlab's version control system helps streamline the process of creating, maintaining, and deploying code, whoever you are.
GitLab was in the right place to capitalise on the recent trend toward rapid digital transformation and remote working. This trend is expected to grow, and with it, GitLab's popularity. With its successful 2021 IPO and the patronage of major brands such as Nasdaq and Jaguar Land Rover, GitLab is expected to solidify its position as the go-to platform for development teams.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
15% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Sep 2019
$268m
SERIES E
Dec 2018
$20m
SERIES D
Total funding: $435.2m
Company benefits
- We offer benefits to manage your health, wealth, and well-being regardless of location
- Flexibility in schedule to be there for life’s important moments
- Equity compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan offered
- Generous Paid Time Off
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Sid Sijbrandij
(CEO)Studied Physics at the University of Twente. Interned at P&G and IBM. Was Lead Architect at the Netherlands' Ministry of Justice from 2009 to 2012. Founded app store Comcoaster in 2008, and then co-founded GitLab in 2012.
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