# Intermediate Backend Engineer, Authorization

**Company**: GitLab
**Location**: Bangalore, India
**Work arrangement**: remote
**Experience**: mid
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/8905402002?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_9a5e0860-4d4

## Description

GitLab is seeking an Intermediate Backend Engineer for its Authorization team. As a Software Engineer on GitLab's Authorization team, you'll help build and maintain the system that decides what every user, token, and automated agent can access on GitLab.com, Self-Managed, and Dedicated.

You'll work alongside experienced engineers who guide the larger design decisions, delivering well-scoped changes and growing into ownership of larger parts of the system. Today, that work is Ruby on Rails. Roughly 400 policy classes and a catalog of about 1,900 permissions sit behind every application programming interface (API) request.

Your responsibilities will include:

- Implementing authorization changes in GitLab's Ruby on Rails monolith so permission checks allow intended access and deny unauthorized access.

- Delivering well-scoped workstreams from feature-flagged rollout through verifying that the old and new systems produce the same results, with review and guidance from senior engineers.

- Building and extending fine-grained permissions for tokens and roles so additional resources have permission coverage consistent with the established catalog.

- Extending and fixing authorization enforcement so GraphQL and the REST API enforce the intended permissions consistently.

- Making incremental refactors to long-lived policy code without changing behavior for existing customers.

- Investigating and fixing reliability, performance, and security issues so affected permission checks return the expected results without regressions.

- Working with the authentication, platform, and artificial intelligence (AI) teams to document interface contracts that keep permission checks consistent as authorization moves toward a shared service.

- Contributing to design documents, merge requests, and code reviews so proposed changes have a documented rationale and review feedback is addressed asynchronously.

To be successful in this role, you'll need:

- Solid experience building and maintaining production Ruby on Rails applications, typically gained over 2 to 4 years or more.

- Hands-on experience with authorization concepts, such as role-based access control or fine-grained permissions, from work or projects.

- A security mindset: you treat a permission bug as a security bug and consider who a change could affect before choosing an implementation.

- Experience making careful changes to existing codebases, including incremental refactors and feature-flagged rollouts that preserve existing behavior.

- Familiarity with GraphQL or API authorization patterns.

- Awareness of performance, including how repeated permission checks can add up on every request.

- Strong written communication and the ability to work effectively when most decisions happen in a document or merge request rather than a meeting.

GitLab offers various benefits, including:

- 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
- Ruby on Rails
- authorization concepts
- role-based access control
- fine-grained permissions
- GraphQL
- API authorization patterns

### Nice to have
- PostgreSQL
- Rust
- gRPC
- Protocol Buffers
- Cedar
- Zanzibar-style authorization systems
- Go
- service-oriented architecture

---

Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/8905402002?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)