Intermediate Backend Engineer - Code Security

Overview

Intermediate Backend Engineer on GitLab's Security Factory: Code Security team, helping developers find and fix security issues in the code they write and the open source components they depend on.

What you'll do

• Develop secure, well-tested, performant parsing for dependency manifests, lockfiles, and software bills of materials (SBOMs).
• Extend support for new package ecosystems and formats in the analysis engine and remediation service.
• Build and apply analyzers that combine deterministic analysis with AI-driven analysis, working with the team's technical leadership.
• Review analyzer results and measure false positives and missed findings against benchmark applications with known vulnerabilities.
• Create detection rules mapped to Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) and the test fixtures that prove they work.
• Contribute to packaging analyzers for continuous integration (CI) jobs, AI agent workflows, and command-line tools, reporting findings in GitLab's standard security report formats.
• Extend the automated remediation service, from running dependency updates in a sandbox to opening merge requests.
• Solve technical problems of moderate scope and complexity.
• Identify technical debt that slows the team down, and propose and implement improvements.
• Write maintainable code that meets internal standards, and help maintain those standards through code review.
• Participate in on-call rotations to troubleshoot product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

What you'll need

• Experience using AI or large language model (LLM) tools to generate or evaluate technical content, with the judgment to know when output is trustworthy.
• Solid professional experience writing and testing production code in a systems language, particularly Go and/or Rust, with a willingness to work across Go, Rust, Ruby and Python.
• A willingness to learn how vulnerabilities arise in code and the software supply chain, explore common vulnerability classes such as OWASP Top 10 and CWE, and apply static analysis to detect them.
• The ability to organize your work and follow through on tasks independently in a remote, largely asynchronous environment.
• The ability to communicate clearly and concisely about technical problems and propose iterative solutions.

Nice to have

• Experience with containerized workflows and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), or a willingness to learn them.
• Experience with package managers and dependency tooling such as npm, Maven, pip, Bundler, or Cargo.
• Experience with web or mobile frameworks.
• Experience with parsing, abstract syntax trees (ASTs), program analysis, or detection rules.
• Experience evaluating AI-driven detection against labeled data.

Details

• Remote role; GitLab's roles are all remote, though some may carry location-based eligibility requirements.
• Largely asynchronous work across time zones; participation in on-call rotations.
• Uses Docker heavily.