Intermediate Backend Engineer (Ruby), Verify: CI Platform

GitLab is an open-core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating human progress. Our platform unites teams and organizations, breaking down barriers and redefining what's possible in software development. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise and Duo Agent Platform, customers get AI benefits at every stage of the SDLC. 

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

As a Backend Engineer joining our team, you will work on the foundational layer of GitLab Continuous Integration (CI) and CI/CD observability capabilities. Our team ensures GitLab CI remains scalable, performant and reliable as we grow, tackling complex challenges in systems with high-volume data processing. . You'll drive improvements to critical database infrastructure, develop solutions that enable organizations to manage their CI/CD infrastructure at scale, and build observability features that provide deep insights into our Runner Fleet operations. As many of our platform initiatives  are engineering-led, you will have the opportunity to contribute to our CI data management strategy, along with collaborating with Product on our observability roadmap. 

The CI Platform group was created in 2024, as part of the Verify stage, upon evaluating that we needed a dedicated team to work on the operational aspects of GitLab CI to ensure our platform remains best-in-class. The team has been largely focused on partitioning CI/CD Data and has started to explore aspects of CI Data retention and improved data management. You will get to dive into some complex technical challenges and collaborate with our infrastructure teams to strategize on solving these exciting challenges related to how we scale and grow CI.  More details can be found in our technical roadmap for Verify.

We live our transparency value by designing our systems and planning our work with publicly facing artifacts.  Some examples of our work include: 

Current/Planned Work

• Implement CI/CD data time decay to optimise storage and performance (design document) 
• Partition CI/CD pipelines data for improved performance at scale
• Reduce the growth rate of CI/CD database
• Explore data retention policies for pipelines data

Recently Completed

• Partitioned the largest 6 CI/CD database tables

• Implement performance and scale improvements for GitLab CI in a fast-paced, iterative environment.
• Collaborate with other stakeholders within Engineering (e.g. other Database or Infrastructure teams) to set best practices in managing a sustainable platform and to maintain a high bar for quality.
• Advocate for improvements to reliability, security, and performance.
• 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.
• Ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.
• Work with your team to assess technical feasibility and discuss how best to iterate on complex problems. This might involve working on proof-of-concept proposals to help guide technical discussions.
• Take ownership of what we build, focusing on stability and availability.

• Professional experience with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL.
• Experience working with a platform or complex application (Large scale is a bonus).
• Familiarity building and deploying software with CI/CD or other internal tooling. 
• Familiarity with distributed, scalable and reliable systems.
• A user of modern DevOps platforms. (GitLab is a bonus.)
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.
• Experience working in a highly agile, iterative software development process.
• Self-motivated and self-managing, with excellent organizational skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization.
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.  

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GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.