Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

As a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group, you’ll work cross-functionally to help us identify and improve the engineering experience across GitLab’s internal engineering teams. We’re at a pivotal time in transforming our testing approach and development experience to enable engineers to deliver high-quality code efficiently and with confidence. 

Developer Experience currently has six, globally distributed teams of Backend Engineers and Software Engineers in Test. This role will work across the entire group to help us identify and remove the biggest points of friction that affect development at GitLab. Expect to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions and helping every team deliver.  You’ll be instrumental in shaping our engineering culture across GitLab.  

This is a highly visible role with strong company-wide support. You’ll be instrumental in shifting our culture and practices toward a cohesive Developer Experience Platform strategy—backed by buy-in and appetite for change.

Some examples of our projects

• Project Examples
  In this role, you may lead projects such as:
  • Internal developer platform adoption: Build and evolve platform capabilities that make it easier for engineering teams to create, deploy, operate, and scale services on Kubernetes.
  • Kubernetes-based service onboarding: Define reusable service templates, deployment workflows, configuration patterns, and operational guardrails for teams adopting the platform.
  • Developer workflows and test environments: Build development, CI, and test environments that reflect production Kubernetes behavior — including third-party operators and the custom resources services depend on — sequencing CRD establishment, controller readiness, and dependent workloads so engineers get a working environment rather than a partially reconciled one, across both local and remote clusters.
  • Platform reliability and observability: 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, progressive delivery, and the custom resources and controllers that services depend on.
  • Make environment bring-up and teardown deterministic — resolving readiness and ordering dependencies between CRDs, controllers, and the workloads that rely on them — so engineers get reproducible environments instead of intermittent failures.
  • 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.
  • Strong hands-on Go experience designing, implementing, testing, and operating production-quality services, command-line tools, automation, or platform tooling. Experience contributing to Ruby-based systems is also valuable for this role.
  • Practical Kubernetes experience building or operating production workloads and platform capabilities, including deployments, services, networking, configuration and secrets, observability, resource management, and troubleshooting.
  • Depth in Kubernetes deployment lifecycle: Helm-based deployment and release management, kubeconfig and multi-cluster context handling including deploying into clusters you don't own, and integrating third-party operators and their custom resources (CloudNativePG, cert-manager and similar) into working environments — including the readiness and ordering problems that come with them: waiting on CRD establishment, controller availability, and custom resources reaching their own definition of ready. Experience authoring a controller or operator is useful but not required.
  • 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.