Senior Backend Engineer, GitLab

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2+ years in backend, platform, or developer-facing tooling
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node, Python, or Golang (Ruby a plus)
• Experience shipping developer-facing tooling where the primary user is another engineer
• Understanding of GitLab-style development workflows (issues, epics, merge requests, CI/CD, code review) as first-class artifacts that automation can read and reason about
• Ability to work in cross-functional environments across multiple platform teams
• Experience with structured content systems, schemas, or validation tooling
• Experience with AI/agentic systems (DAP, ADK, LangGraph, or similar) OR demonstrated ability to reason rigorously about the boundary between what AI should decide and what humans must own
• Background in developer experience or platform engineering
• Experience with governance patterns for shared standards and cross-org decision-making
• Open source contribution history in platform, developer experience, or AI infrastructure
• PostgreSQL or other relational database experience at scale
• 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

Desirable

• As a Senior Backend Engineer on the newly established Platform Readiness team, you'll architect and evolve the systems that enable features to ship successfully across all platforms by automating the evaluation of platform readiness requirements and surfacing risks early
• You'll be a technical anchor for the team, driving the evolution of platform readiness from manual, ad-hoc assessments toward intelligent, agentic automation. Your work will directly impact GitLab's ability to ship features faster while dramatically reducing the risk of platform-readiness gaps and the operational burden of cross-platform validation
• You'll receive onboarding and technical guidance from other engineers and team leadership as you establish the technical direction for the Platform Readiness team
• Contribute to the Platform Readiness team's agentic workflows on the Duo Agent Platform: design, implement, and evolve the Core Agentic Workflow (currently published to the AI Catalog as a DAP flow) and the Requirements Agent, enabling automated evaluation of platform readiness assessments against platform requirements
• Evolve the platform requirements knowledge base: contribute to schema design, validation tooling, and CI systems that power the agentic workflow; ensure the schema captures the full scope of platform readiness concerns across all four platforms and domains
• Build integration surfaces that enable feature teams to engage the Platform Readiness team where they already work: issues, merge requests, design documents, and CI/CD pipelines
• Partner with platform teams (Infrastructure, Security, Data) to translate their expertise into structured platform requirements, domain skills, and validation logic without requiring specific domain knowledge
• Contribute to the quality control feedback loop: design systems that surface assessment errors, missed gaps, and content drift back to the governance loop for continuous improvement; measure and improve assessment accuracy and guidance relevance
• Mentor other engineers on the team in agentic-workflow standards, prompt discipline, evaluation methodology, and the principles of human-AI collaboration in platform readiness
• Contribute to technical documentation and architectural decision records that document the Platform Readiness team's technical evolution and rationale for key design choices
• You'll be joining a newly established Platform Readiness team that is building the capability to embed platform readiness intelligence into the development lifecycle
• As a Senior engineer, you'll work closely with team leadership to define technical direction while mentoring other engineers on the team. You'll receive onboarding and technical guidance from other engineers and team leadership on the Platform Readiness team's architecture and agentic-workflow patterns