Staff Backend Engineer (Go), Software Supply Chain Security: Secrets Management

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to enhance developer productivity and reduce security risks. They are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer focused on Secrets Management to lead the technical strategy for GitLab Secrets Manager and collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure secure, scalable solutions for managing secrets across CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the technical strategy for GitLab Secrets Manager, setting architecture direction for secure, multi-tenant secrets management at scale
• Own the integration between GitLab and OpenBao, including namespaces, authentication mechanisms, and policy management
• Collaborate with Pipeline Security, Authentication, and Platform teams to propose, review, and deliver cross-team secrets management improvements
• Partner with GitLab.com Infrastructure teams to ensure secrets management meets reliability, performance, and operational requirements
• Represent GitLab in the OpenBao open source project by contributing features upstream, participating in technical steering discussions, and maintaining strong technical credibility
• Mentor and advise engineers on secrets management, cryptographic systems, and secure architecture patterns, raising the quality and consistency of designs and implementations
• Interface with engineering managers and senior leadership to scope initiatives, clarify tradeoffs, and unblock delivery across teams
• Engage with customers and external stakeholders to understand real-world needs and communicate GitLab's secrets management capabilities and roadmap direction

Requirements:

• Experience designing and operating secrets management systems (for example, HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao, or cloud-native offerings), including secure storage, access control, and audit logging
• Ability to lead architecture decisions for resilient, multi-tenant services that handle secrets operations at scale, including high availability and cluster management patterns
• Working knowledge of cryptographic and key management concepts, such as encryption in transit and at rest, key derivation, and hardware security module (HSM) or PKCS#11 integrations
• Experience implementing authentication and authorization integrations, such as JSON Web Token (JWT) or OpenID Connect (OIDC), mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS), and certificate-based authentication
• Proficiency building product integrations in Go (within the OpenBao or Vault ecosystem) and Ruby on Rails for GitLab platform integration
• Experience contributing to open source projects and working effectively with distributed governance, balancing upstream needs with product requirements
• Demonstrated ability to operate with high autonomy, drive strategy, and serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders (including constructively challenging assumptions and tradeoffs)
• Strong communication and collaboration skills to influence across teams and levels, including mentoring engineers and working in a fully remote, asynchronous environment