Staff Backend Engineer, EMEA

Overview

Staff Backend Engineer responsible for technical leadership, architecture strategy, and cross-cutting backend initiatives at GitLab.

What you'll do

• Lead large, cross-team backend initiatives and remove systemic bottlenecks.
• Drive modular backend/service/data/platform architecture and monolith modernization.
• Define and improve standards for APIs, testing, security, performance, observability, and maintainability.
• Create shared patterns for dependency management, data ownership, eventing, failure isolation, and operational documentation.
• Participate in on-call and incident response and act as a technical escalation point.
• Mentor engineers and guide technical debt reduction and reusable patterns.
• Lead adoption of AI-assisted/agentic engineering workflows and define quality/security/privacy guardrails.

What you'll need

• A sustained record of technical leadership across more than one team or a broad product area.
• Deep backend architecture and production experience in complex applications/services/platforms.
• Production experience modernizing a monolith or legacy backend using modular architecture approaches.
• Ability to create alignment through written proposals and decision records.
• Product judgment balancing customer outcomes, delivery speed, reliability, and platform investment.
• Experience mentoring engineers through code review, documentation, and example.
• Production experience with AI-assisted/agentic engineering workflows.

Details

• Work mode: Remote-first/asynchronous organization.
• Base location: Poland.