Senior Software Engineer, Security Factory: Code Security

Overview

Senior 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

• Act as the directly responsible individual (DRI) for team initiatives from design through delivery, shipping with minimal guidance in partnership with the technical lead
• Bring systems built by one engineer to team ownership through documentation, tests, and shared review
• Design and ship analyzers that pair deterministic analysis capabilities with AI-driven analysis
• Build evaluation harnesses that measure false positives and missed findings against benchmark applications with known vulnerabilities
• Create detection rules mapped to CWE and the test fixtures that prove they work
• Package analyzers for every place GitLab runs them, including CI jobs, AI agent workflows, and command-line tools, with findings reported in GitLab's standard security report formats
• Design and ship manifest, lockfile, and SBOM parsing that tells the static analysis engine what a project depends on, and extend it to new ecosystems and formats
• Ship features across the automated remediation service that turns security advisories into dependency update merge requests, from sandboxed updates to merge request creation
• Solve technical problems of high scope and complexity, actively seek out difficult impediments affecting the whole team, and advocate for improvements to quality, security, and performance with Product Management, Engineering stakeholders such as Frontend and UX, and partner teams such as Code Scanning and Composition Analysis
• Mentor intermediate engineers through code review and pairing, and maintain internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices through review
• Participate in on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues

What you'll need

• Experience building your own LLM tooling, such as a harness, an agent pipeline, or evaluations, with the judgment to know when output is trustworthy and when it isn't
• Substantial professional experience writing and testing production code in a systems language, particularly Go and/or Rust, with depth in at least one
• Willingness to work across Go, Rust, Ruby (remediation side) and Python (some analyzers)
• Familiarity with package managers and dependency management in one or more language ecosystems, such as npm, Maven, pip, Bundler, or Cargo
• Demonstrated application security experience, such as vulnerability research, secure code review, or writing detection rules
• Fluency with vulnerability classes (OWASP Top 10, CWE) and the software supply chain
• A track record of taking ownership of ambiguous problems and shipping with minimal guidance, with self-motivation and organizational skills suited to a remote, largely asynchronous environment
• Demonstrated capacity to communicate clearly and concisely about technical problems, and to write design proposals that bring a team to a decision

Nice to have

• Experience building tooling around package managers and dependency management ecosystems
• Experience evaluating AI-driven detection against labeled data, including measuring false positives and missed findings
• Experience with performance optimization at scale
• Hands-on program analysis experience, such as parsing, ASTs, or data-flow analysis
• Familiarity with popular web or mobile application frameworks and how they handle input, data, and configuration
• Experience with containerized workflows and CI/CD (Docker used heavily)

Details

• Remote, Canada; Remote, United States
• United States base salary range: $139,200 – $235,200 USD (base salary only; excludes bonuses, equity, and benefits)
• Participate in on-call rotations
• Asynchronous work across time zones