Staff Backend Engineer, Developer Experience

GitLab is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to improve the engineering experience across its internal engineering teams. The role leads developer tooling and internal platform capabilities, shaping Kubernetes-based workflows and partnering across teams to improve reliability, security, and developer productivity.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and grow a team responsible for developer tooling and internal platform capabilities used by engineering teams to build and operate services
• Set and execute a roadmap for Kubernetes-based developer workflows, balancing developer experience, platform reliability, security, and operational efficiency
• Guide the design of reusable onboarding and deployment patterns for services running on Kubernetes, including workloads, networking, configuration and secrets, identity, storage, observability, progressive delivery, and the custom resources and controllers that services depend on
• Make environment bring-up and teardown deterministic — resolving readiness and ordering dependencies between CRDs, controllers, and the workloads that rely on them — so engineers get reproducible environments instead of intermittent failures
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and application teams to turn Kubernetes capabilities into simple, well-supported workflows rather than requiring every service team to become a Kubernetes expert
• Establish engineering standards, documentation, automation, and feedback loops that improve adoption and reduce the time required to bring a service from development to production
• Coach engineers through architectural decisions, incident follow-up, and production operations while maintaining a clear focus on sustainable team delivery
• Represent the team with technical and organizational stakeholders, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and use adoption and reliability measures to guide prioritization

Requirements:

• Deep experience building developer tooling, DevEx platforms, testing frameworks, or CI/CD systems at scale
• Strong hands-on Go experience designing, implementing, testing, and operating production-quality services, command-line tools, automation, or platform tooling
• Practical Kubernetes experience building or operating production workloads and platform capabilities, including deployments, services, networking, configuration and secrets, observability, resource management, and troubleshooting
• Depth in Kubernetes deployment lifecycle: Helm-based deployment and release management, kubeconfig and multi-cluster context handling including deploying into clusters you don't own, and integrating third-party operators and their custom resources (CloudNativePG, cert-manager and similar) into working environments — including the readiness and ordering problems that come with them: waiting on CRD establishment, controller availability, and custom resources reaching their own definition of ready
• Experience designing scalable solutions that improve engineering productivity, test reliability, development environments, or delivery workflows across multiple teams
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and influence without authority across engineering, infrastructure, security, and product functions
• Familiarity with DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, and production operations
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment
• A product mindset with a passion for empowering developers through simple, reliable, and well-documented workflows
• Alignment with GitLab values, especially collaboration, iteration, and transparency
• Experience contributing to Ruby-based systems is also valuable for this role
• Experience authoring a controller or operator is useful but not required