Senior Backend Engineer (Go), Tenant Scales: Gitaly

GitLab
Canada
Remote

Who this role is best for

Geared toward experienced backend engineers comfortable with distributed systems and operational ownership, working in a remote environment with a focus on cross-functional collaboration and technical leadership.

Best fit for

  • Experienced backend engineers with a strong background in distributed systems and a willingness to take ownership of complex technical initiatives.
    — “Own moderately sized to complex technical initiatives from problem definition and proposal through implementation”
  • Candidates who have led systems design and implemented performance, reliability, and scalability improvements in production environments.
    — “Lead technical design for distributed storage, Git repository management, performance, reliability, and scalability problems”
  • Individuals with a track record of mentoring and improving team practices through documentation and knowledge sharing.
    — “Experience mentoring engineers, improving team practices, and raising the quality of designs, code, testing, and documentation”

Things to consider

  • Operational ownership includes on-call duties and incident response, which may require availability outside regular hours.
    — “Respond to user emergencies, platform alerts, and support requests, including regular on-call duties”
  • The role requires balancing multiple responsibilities, including technical delivery, cross-team collaboration, and system improvements.
    — “You’ll balance roadmap delivery, technical improvements, customer and reliability work, and operational support”

How to stand out

  • Highlight experience with Go and backend systems languages, especially in large-scale production environments.
    — “Professional experience with Go or another backend or systems language”
  • Emphasize cross-functional collaboration and project ownership in your resume and interviews.
    — “Act as the directly responsible individual for projects by aligning stakeholders, communicating progress and trade-offs”
  • Showcase your ability to turn operational learnings into durable improvements and system optimizations.
    — “turning operational learnings into durable improvements”
  • Demonstrate your ability to improve engineering practices through mentorship and documentation.
    — “Improve engineering practices through mentoring, documentation, knowledge sharing, design reviews”
  • Include examples of work involving Git internals or Git server infrastructure in your application materials.
    — “Experience with Ruby, Git internals, gRPC, or Git server infrastructure is highly desirable”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • successful implementation of new features
  • improved system reliability
Typical background
software engineeringbackend development

Skills & requirements

Required

Go ProgrammingDistributed SystemsPerformance TuningObservability

Preferred

AI IntegrationGitlab Ecosystem

Stack & domain

Backend EngineeringGoGit Data StorageDistributed StorageRepository ManagementPerformanceReliabilityScalabilityAIProblem-solvingCommunicationCollaborationMentoringDocumentationKnowledge SharingIncident ResponseSoftware DevelopmentDevSecOpsCloud SoftwareGitLab

About the role

Original posting from GitLab via Greenhouse

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

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.

*Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

An overview of this role

As a Backend Engineer on the Gitaly team, you’ll help build GitLab’s Git data storage tier, a standalone product that provides reliable, secure, and fast access to Git repositories through application programming interfaces (APIs) and storage operations. You’ll work at the boundary between GitLab and Git to make repository access performant and dependable for GitLab.com, self-managed customers, and GitLab Dedicated. Our work spans distributed storage, repository management, high availability, performance, observability, and operational excellence. We’re currently building the next generation of source code management (SCM), including new approaches to scaling Git storage and improving how repository data is managed and served.

You’ll balance roadmap delivery, technical improvements, customer and reliability work, and operational support. We value pragmatic engineering, thoughtful trade-offs, continuous improvement, and sustainable ways of working while operating a service that’s critical to GitLab. Learn more on the Gitaly Team Page.

What you’ll do

Own moderately sized to complex technical initiatives from problem definition and proposal through implementation, rollout, monitoring, and operational follow-through.

Act as the directly responsible individual for projects by aligning stakeholders, communicating progress and trade-offs, identifying risks, and keeping execution moving with minimal guidance.

Lead technical design for distributed storage, Git repository management, performance, reliability, and scalability problems, using data and benchmarking to guide decisions.

Partner with engineers and teams across GitLab, including Git, Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Dedicated, and customer-facing teams, to deliver cross-functional outcomes.

Improve engineering practices through mentoring, documentation, knowledge sharing, design reviews, and constructive code reviews.

Take operational ownership of the systems you work on, including incident response, post-incident improvements, capacity and performance analysis, and customer escalations.

Identify opportunities to improve work beyond an individual change through automation, reusable designs, better dashboards, upstream contributions, and improvements to development and testing workflows.

Respond to user emergencies, platform alerts, and support requests, including regular on-call duties.

Take part in on-call or operational support where your team’s ownership model requires it.

What you’ll bring

Significant professional experience building, debugging, and optimizing distributed or highly available software systems in large-scale production environments.

Experience owning complex projects end to end, including technical design, execution, rollout, and operational support.

Strong systems design skills and the ability to reason about performance, failure modes, consistency, concurrency, capacity, and observability.

A track record of influencing technical decisions and working effectively with stakeholders across teams and disciplines.

Experience mentoring engineers, improving team practices, and raising the quality of designs, code, testing, and documentation.

Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts and make trade-offs clear.

Professional experience with Go or another backend or systems language.

Experience operating production systems, participating in incident response, and turning operational learnings into durable improvements.

Experience with Ruby, Git internals, gRPC, or Git server infrastructure is highly desirable.

About the team

The Gitaly team includes Backend Engineers who share ownership of the product’s design, implementation, reliability, and customer outcomes. We work autonomously while collaborating closely through design discussions, code reviews, incident response, documentation, and asynchronous communication. Engineers are encouraged to take ownership as directly responsible individuals, seek input early, make decisions transparently, and share knowledge across the team. Learn more on the Gitaly Team Page.

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

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 

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

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.  

Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.

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.

Source: GitLab careers (Greenhouse)

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