Gitlab Hiring for Backend Engineer, Manager Full Time

Backend Engineering Roles at GitLab

Backend Engineers at GitLab work on our product. This includes both the open source version of GitLab, the enterprise editions, and the GitLab.com service as well. They work with peers on teams dedicated to areas of the product. They work together with product managers, designers, and frontend engineers to solve common goals.

Unless otherwise specified, all Backend Engineering roles at GitLab share the following requirements and responsibilities: Requirements

• Significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails or language required by the specialty
• Professional experience with any other technologies that may be required by the specialty
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment
• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions
• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
• Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process
• Demonstrated ability to onboard and integrate with an organization long-term
• Positive and solution-oriented mindset
• Effective communication skills: Regularly achieve consensus with peers , and clear status updates
• An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility
• Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.
• Self-motivated and self-managing , with strong organizational skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization
• Share our values , and work in accordance with those values
• Ability to thrive in a fully remote organization
• Ability to use GitLab

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in a peak performance organization, preferably a tech startup
• Experience with the GitLab product as a user or contributor
• Product company experience
• Experience working with a remote team
• Enterprise software company experience
• Developer platform/tool industry experience
• Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team
• Computer science education or equivalent experience
• Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools

Responsibilities

• Develop features and improvements to the GitLab product in a secure, well-tested, and performant way
• Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders within Engineering (Frontend, UX, etc.) to maintain a high bar for quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment
• Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance
• Solve technical problems of moderate scope and complexity.
• Craft code that meets our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.
• Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team (“technical debt”), propose and implement solutions
• Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around specific projects and community contributions.
• Confidently ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.
• Participate in Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday and weekend and occasional night on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

Professional Experience

At GitLab, due to the pace we’re moving, people joining our team will be expected to have significant professional experience in the primary programming language of the specialty that they’ll be joining. Because the majority of our codebase is written in Ruby, even in specialized roles, a knowledge of Ruby and Ruby on Rails or a desire to learn and contribute is necessary.

For context, see this merge request with some history on this policy . Primary programming language

Some specialties within GitLab are using primary programming languages other than Ruby. These programming languages are defined as being primary in terms of an engineer’s experience and what they’ll be writing day to day. The expecation from the specialty is that engineers will have extensive experience in this primary programming language as well as some level of understanding of Ruby and, Ruby on Rails. Backend Engineer Performance Indicators

Backend Engineers have the following job-family performance indicators.

• Backend Unit Test Coverage
• Mean Time to Merge (MTTM)

Engineering Managers have the following job-family performance indicators.

• Response to Community SLO
• Hiring Actual vs. Plan
• Team/Group Throughput
• Team/Group MR Rate
• Diversity
• Handbook Update Frequency
• Team Member Retention

Levels

Read more about levels at GitLab here. Junior Backend Engineer

Junior Backend Engineers share the same requirements and responsibilities outlined above, but typically join with less or alternate experience than a typical Backend Engineer. Job Grade

The Junior Backend Engineer is a grade 5 . Backend Engineer Job Grade

The Backend Engineer is a grade 6 . Senior Backend Engineer

The Senior Backend Engineer role extends the Backend Engineer role. Job Grade

The Senior Backend Engineer is a grade 7 . Responsibilities

• Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance that have particular impact across your team.
• Solve technical problems of high scope and complexity.
• Exert influence on the overall objectives and long-range goals of your team.
• Experience with performance and optimization problems, particularly at large scale, and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
• Help to define and improve our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.
• Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around broader initiatives, specific projects, and community contributions.
• Provide mentorship for Junior and Intermediate Engineers on your team to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and remove blockers to their autonomy.
• Confidently ship moderately sized features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.
• Improves the engineering projects at GitLab via maintainer trainee program at own comfortable pace, while striving to become a project maintainer .

A Senior Backend Engineer may want to pursue the engineering management track at this point as a manager of people or a higher level individual contributor. See Engineering Career Development for more detail.

Note: Staff and above positions at GitLab are more of a role than just a “level”. We prefer to bring people in as Senior and let the team elevate them to Staff due to an outstanding work history within GitLab.

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