Senior Backend Engineer, Database Excellence (Ruby)

In this Senior Backend Engineer role, you will advance GitLab's data frameworks to keep application datastores scalable, healthy, and safe across GitLab.com and self-managed instances. You’ll build retention and lifecycle management and enforce policies at schema-change time, guiding teams on data architecture and lifecycle decisions. The role blends hands-on PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails work with cross-functional collaboration to improve performance and scalability. This position offers remote, agile collaboration and a chance to shape data health features for a broad user base.

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

• Develop backend features and data frameworks to enable scalable data handling across SaaS and self-managed deployments
• Design and implement data retention and lifecycle management frameworks, including retention enforcement and bulk data removal tooling
• Build guardrails at schema-change time to prevent unsustainable data growth before production
• Collaborate with product management, UX, frontend, infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics to ship high-performing solutions
• Review database-related changes for data integrity, safety, and performance across deployment scenarios
• Create tooling such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks to address scalability and performance issues
• Research and implement improvements in data retention, database performance, scalability, and data health (e.g., soft delete strategies, migration testing)
• Document database best practices and architecture guidance for developers
• Develop proactive tooling and guardrails to detect and remediate potential issues early in the lifecycle
• Shape scalability and data health features for self-managed customers as part of the Data Engineering organization

• Professional software engineering experience with PostgreSQL in large production environments
• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails or another Ruby framework; backend design and review experience
• Ability to reason about software design, algorithms, and system-level performance trade-offs
• Strong written communication and comfort working asynchronously in a distributed team
• Self-directed work style with strong prioritization
• Alignment with GitLab values (transparency, collaboration, inclusion, open source)
• Willingness to participate in tier 2 database on-call rotation
• Openness to learning new tools and approaches and transferable experience from related domains

• Strong written communication
• Comfort working asynchronously in a distributed team
• Self-directed and organized
• PostgreSQL in large production environments
• Ruby on Rails or similar Ruby framework
• Backend design and performance trade-offs