GitLab is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Cells Infrastructure team. You will build the foundation that lets GitLab.com scale horizontally through our Cells architecture, focusing on edge routing services and the Topology Service that serves as the source of truth for cluster topology.
What You'll Do
- Design and implement edge traffic routing that directs requests to the correct Cell transparently to users.
- Build and evolve the Topology Service as the authoritative source of cluster state for routing, resource assignment, and Cell lifecycle decisions.
- Collaborate across the GitLab Rails monolith and supporting services to make features and data models Cell-aware with product feature teams.
- Operate and improve routing and topology systems by participating in tier-2 on-call, responding to escalated incidents, and strengthening observability and operational tooling.
- Author Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), operational runbooks, and documentation so other teams can understand, adopt, and extend the Cells platform.
- Review merge requests from GitLab team members and community contributors, maintaining high standards for correctness, performance, and security.
What We're Looking For
- Experience building observable, resilient production services using Go or Ruby on Rails.
- Background delivering and operating production systems in high-scale environments, including incident response and operational ownership.
- Ability to reason about distributed systems, including consistency models, partitioning strategies, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs.
- Familiarity working in large, multi-team codebases and coordinating changes across teams and services.
- Knowledge of observability practices such as metrics, tracing, and alerting, with an approach focused on building systems you'd be confident operating on-call.
- Strong written communication skills for an async-first, globally distributed team, including documenting decisions and runbooks.
- Experience working with relational databases in production, including schema design, migrations, and query performance tuning.
Nice to Have
- TypeScript experience.
- Knowledge of gRPC and protocol buffers.
- PostgreSQL experience.
Technical Stack
- TypeScript, Go, Ruby on Rails
- gRPC, Protocol Buffers
- PostgreSQL
Team & Environment
The Cells Infrastructure team is a globally distributed, all-remote group of Backend Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers within the Tenant Scale group in Infrastructure Platforms.
Benefits & Compensation
- 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.
- Home office support.
Work Mode
This is a global, all-remote position.
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, or any other basis protected by law.
