Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), Production Engineering:Tenant Controls

Overview

Senior Backend Engineer on the Tenant Controls team within Production Engineering, designing, implementing and evolving backend capabilities for GitLab.com's application-level rate limiting framework in a remote-first, asynchronous environment.

What you'll do

• Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, choosing between modular-monolith code, shared components, and independently operated services.
• Influence team objectives, technical direction, and long-range goals, partnering with product managers and designers to shape requirements around user needs.
• Define backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, application programming interfaces (APIs), and operational readiness, advocating for quality, security, availability, and performance.
• Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve delivery practices through code and design reviews.
• Diagnose and prevent performance and reliability issues at scale, participate in incident response, and act as a technical owner where appropriate.
• Experiment with and integrate agentic AI into production engineering workflows, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible use and sound judgment.
• Take part in on-call or operational support where your team's ownership model requires it.

What you'll need

• Strong command of backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in a complex product or service environment.
• Proficiency in modern backend languages and a deep understanding of systems programming, with the ability to learn and adapt rather than mastery of a single language.
• Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures.
• Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear asynchronous written communication, connecting product needs with technical decisions and directing your own work.
• Experience building or operating agentic AI systems in production, including loops, tool use, and error-handling strategies that support reliability at scale, beyond prompt engineering alone.

Nice to have

• Experience with high-throughput distributed systems, concurrency or profiling.
• Containerized production operations (such as Kubernetes).
• Database performance (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, schema evolution or partitioning).
• Large-scale modular monoliths or event-driven systems.
• Public technical communication, open source maintenance or developer-focused software as a service (SaaS).

Details

• Location: Remote, Poland (EU residents; country-specific eligibility applies).
• Work mode: remote-first, asynchronous.
• Base salary range for Poland: 272,000zł - 408,000zł (excludes bonuses, equity, and benefits).
• Employment type: full-time (as stated in the benefits section for full-time employees).