Join GitLab as a Backend Engineer, Database

The GitLab DevSecOps platform empowers over 100,000 organizations to deliver software faster and more efficiently. As one of the world’s largest all-remote companies, with over 2,000 team members, we cultivate a culture where everyone believes that they can contribute.

About the Role

At GitLab, our developers are independent, self-organized individual contributors who collaborate as a cohesive team in a remote and agile environment. The Database Group focuses on solutions for scalability, application performance, data growth, and developer enablement—particularly regarding database interactions. To support our value of Transparency, the Database Group page includes links to our current workboards, team meeting recordings, and our roadmap. If this excites you, read on!

Your Responsibilities

Backend developers at GitLab are involved in building features, fixing bugs, and generally improving the application with a specific focus on enhancing database performance, availability, and reliability. Beyond these tasks, you will review database-related code with the ultimate goal of becoming a Database Maintainer.

Key Areas of Work

Our work is categorized into two main areas: Responsive and Enablement.

• Responsive Work: This includes performance tuning, scaling, and providing SQL expertise. You'll typically review slow-performing queries and recommend improvements.
• Enablement: This area is about creating development efficiencies and improving scalability for GitLab.com. We're building tools to enable teams to implement scalable solutions.

Current Initiatives:

• Database Partitioning
• Cluster-wide Unique Identifiers for Cells Topology Service
• Load Balancer Improvements
• Automated Database Migration Testing

What You'll Do

• Develop new features in collaboration with product management, UX, and frontend teams
• Keep changes minimal and iterate towards optimal solutions
• Review database-related changes submitted by other engineers or community contributors
• Document database best practices or patterns to avoid
• Develop tooling to proactively alert developers to potential performance issues
• Research, design, and implement solutions to enhance product performance

What You'll Bring

• Professional software engineering experience with PostgreSQL in large production environments
• Significant experience with Ruby on Rails or other Ruby frameworks
• Ability to reason about software, algorithms, and performance at a high level
• Passion for open source
• Strong written communication skills
• Self-motivated with strong organizational skills
• Alignment with our core values

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience in a high-performance organization, preferably a tech startup
• Experience with the GitLab product as a user or contributor
• Previous work in a product company
• Experience working with a remote team
• Background in enterprise software companies
• Experience in the developer platform/tool industry
• Experience working with global or multicultural teams
• Computer science education or equivalent experience

Additional Information

GitLab hires new team members from countries around the world, offering fully remote roles. Some positions may have specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team will answer any questions regarding location during the recruitment process. For additional details, please review our

Equal Opportunity Employment

GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and an affirmative action employer. We base recruitment, employment, career development, advancement, promotion, and retirement decisions solely on merit, irrespective of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex, national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. We do not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on these characteristics. For more information, see GitLab’s EEO Policy