Senior Backend Engineer, Create: Source Code Experience (Ruby)

An overview of this role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Source Code Experience team within GitLab's Create stage. You'll help make everyday source code workflows clear, reliable, and efficient for people working across GitLab projects. As artificial intelligence agents increasingly write and manage code alongside people, you'll build backend capabilities and interfaces that support trustworthy collaboration between people and agents.

You'll work in one of GitLab's oldest and most complex product areas, using Ruby and GraphQL to improve critical source code experiences across GitLab.com, self-managed instances, and GitLab Dedicated. The Source Code group is responsible for the backend and frontend aspects of the product categories within Source Code. You'll help maintain high reliability through performance and structured query language tuning, caching, rate limiting, testing, observability, and resiliency. You'll collaborate with product management, product design, testing, security, user experience research, technical writing, Gitaly, Code Review, and other Source Code teams to deliver reliable and performant systems.

Learn more about the Create:Source Code teams in the GitLab Handbook.

What you’ll do

• Develop secure, well-tested, performant features and improvements using Ruby and GraphQL.
• Turn complex requirements and legacy constraints into clear solutions without compromising the reliability of this critical system.
• Design and maintain backend services, application programming interfaces, data models, and business logic that support intuitive source code workflows.
• Collaborate across functions and teams, both asynchronously and synchronously, involving domain experts when their input will improve the outcome.
• Use artificial intelligence agents for well-scoped work when they can speed up delivery without sacrificing quality, and critically review their output.
• Write maintainable code that follows GitLab's standards and advocate for those standards through code review.
• Strengthen reliability by monitoring production health metrics, participating in Tier 2 on-call, troubleshooting incidents, performing root cause analysis, and improving observability and resiliency.
• Share knowledge through code review, technical documentation, and everyday collaboration while learning from others.

What you’ll bring

• Professional experience building backend web applications, services, or application programming interfaces using Ruby and GraphQL.
• A solid understanding of relational databases, structured query language, data modeling, caching, background processing, and backend performance best practices.
• Experience improving complex, user-facing workflows and making their underlying systems reliable and maintainable.
• Experience writing backend unit, integration, and acceptance tests, with familiarity with the testing pyramid, Git, and collaborative code review processes.
• Experience using artificial intelligence coding agents to scope tasks, review output, and assess their limitations in a complex monorepo.
• Clear written and spoken English communication skills, including the ability to influence without authority and share useful status updates in a remote, asynchronous environment.
• The ability to manage priorities independently, work through ambiguity, take ownership, and seek guidance for decisions that are difficult to reverse.

About the team

The Source Code Experience team works within GitLab's Source Code group, which owns the backend and frontend aspects of the product categories that support source code workflows. The team focuses on making core source code experiences clear, consistent, and dependable while maintaining the availability, reliability, and performance expected from a critical part of GitLab. You'll work closely with Code Review, Gitaly, and other Source Code teams to improve how people and artificial intelligence agents interact with repositories and source code across GitLab.

We welcome candidates with different levels and types of experience. Many successful candidates don't meet every requirement. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiting team to assess your application.