# Staff Backend Engineer, India **Company**: GitLab **Location**: Remote, India **Work arrangement**: remote **Experience**: staff **Job type**: full-time **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Technology **Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/8775136002?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_65d81f22-cf5 ## Description GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organisations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across your team and adjacent teams, solving the highest-scope and most complex problems in your area. You will lead large, cross-cutting backend initiatives, drive our modular architecture strategy, and define the standards that let teams move faster without compromising quality, security, reliability, or operability. ## Why you’ll love this role - Leverage: Your work multiplies across teams. The platforms, standards, and architectural decisions you lead determine how quickly everyone else can ship. - Genuinely Hard Problems: You’ll lead the modernisation of a large monolith toward modular, reusable, appropriately independent systems , at the scale of a platform used by millions of users. - Influence Without Bureaucracy: You’ll shape technical direction across teams through clear written proposals and decision records, and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform roadmap and investment trade-offs. - Frontier AI Work: You’ll lead adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering workflows and define the review, quality, security, and privacy guardrails that make them safe to rely on. - Autonomy: You’ll thrive in our remote-first, asynchronous organisation, where clear written communication and self-direction are the pillars of success. ## What you’ll do - Lead Cross-Cutting Initiatives: Lead the technical design and delivery of large backend initiatives that span teams, and identify and remove systemic bottlenecks across product and infrastructure groups. - Own Architecture Strategy: Drive modular backend, service, data, and platform architecture. Lead modernisation of the monolith and legacy backends toward modular, reusable, and appropriately independently operated systems , while preventing fragmentation and service sprawl. - Set the Standards: Define and improve standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, schema evolution, testing, security, performance, observability, operability, and maintainability , plus the build, test, deploy, release, rollback, and production-readiness practices needed to operate modular features safely. - Establish Shared Patterns: Create the patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, service maturity, and operational documentation. - Own What You Build in Production: Take part in on-call and incident response for the systems your teams own, act as a technical escalation point during complex incidents, and turn what you learn into architectural and operational improvements that prevent recurrence. - Influence and Partner: Shape technical direction across teams without formal authority, and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform-level roadmap decisions and investment trade-offs. - Grow Engineers: Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers, shepherd technical debt reduction and reusable patterns that improve throughput, and raise the technical capability of the wider team. - Lead AI Adoption: Lead team-level adoption of AI-assisted and agentic workflows, including the quality, security, privacy, and operational guardrails, and help engineers direct, validate, reject, and course-correct agent output. ## What you’ll bring - Cross-Team Technical Leadership: A sustained record of technical leadership across more than one team or a broad product area. - Deep Architecture Experience: Deep backend architecture and production experience in complex applications, services, or platforms, including scaling or governing APIs, service platforms, data systems, modular monoliths, or shared backend components. - Modularisation in Production: Experience modernising a monolith or legacy backend architecture in production, and with modular architecture such as bounded contexts, package encapsulation, ports and adapters, service extraction, event-driven boundaries, or an equivalent approach. - Influence Without Authority: A strong ability to create alignment through clear written proposals and decision records, so decisions are documented, understood, and adopted without constant escalation. - Product Judgment: The ability to balance customer outcomes, delivery speed, technical health, reliability, and long-term platform investment. - Mentorship: Experience mentoring engineers and shaping standards through code review, documentation, and example. - Agentic AI Leadership: Production experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows, including the ability to evaluate and improve how a team adopts them. ## Helpful experience - Go services and APIs at scale. - Kubernetes and cloud-native operations, including deployment, scaling, observability, rollback, and production readiness. - Rust adoption or production ownership for systems, security, performance, or platform components. - Ruby/Rails modularisation and large-monolith modernisation. - PostgreSQL scaling, data partitioning, queues, messaging, or distributed systems. - Security-sensitive product or software supply chain engineering. - Experience across SaaS, single-tenant, self-managed, or air-gapped deployment constraints. ## How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees - 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 ## Skills ### Required - Cross-Team Technical Leadership - Deep Architecture Experience - Modularisation in Production - Influence Without Authority - Product Judgment - Mentorship - Agentic AI Leadership ### Nice to have - Go services and APIs at scale - Kubernetes and cloud-native operations - Rust adoption or production ownership - Ruby/Rails modularisation and large-monolith modernisation - PostgreSQL scaling, data partitioning, queues, messaging, or distributed systems - Security-sensitive product or software supply chain engineering --- Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/8775136002?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)