Staff Backend Engineer, EMEA

GitLab is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership across teams and solve complex problems in the EMEA region.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will lead large, cross-cutting backend initiatives, drive the modular architecture strategy, and define standards for teams to move faster without compromising quality, security, reliability, or operability.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead cross-cutting initiatives and identify systemic bottlenecks
• Own architecture strategy and drive modernization of the monolith and legacy backends
• Set standards for APIs, contracts, compatibility, and testing
• Establish shared patterns for dependency management, data ownership, and operational documentation
• Own what you build in production and participate in on-call and incident response
• Influence and partner with Product and Engineering leadership on platform-level roadmap decisions
• Grow engineers and mentor senior and intermediate engineers
• Lead AI adoption and define guardrails for AI-assisted workflows

Requirements:

• Cross-team technical leadership experience
• Deep backend architecture and production experience
• Experience modernizing monoliths or legacy backend architectures
• Strong ability to create alignment through clear written proposals
• Product judgment and mentorship experience
• Experience with AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflows

Preferred skills:

• Go services and APIs at scale
• Kubernetes and cloud-native operations
• Rust adoption or production ownership
• Ruby/Rails modularization and large-monolith modernization
• PostgreSQL scaling and data partitioning