Staff Backend Engineer, Performance Enablement

Overview

Staff Backend Engineer in GitLab's Performance Enablement group, building the self-serve platform that lets GitLab engineering teams own their performance.

What you'll do

• Define the team's technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap with the Engineering Manager, identify opportunities for impact across R&D, and advocate for technical priorities with stakeholders.
• Design and build reusable platform capabilities for performance testing, analysis, reporting, and trend visibility, solving complex technical problems and shipping large capabilities with minimal guidance.
• Turn lessons from early team engagements into reusable capabilities, documentation, and onboarding, measured by each new team needing less hands-on support than the last until teams can manage their performance independently.
• Coordinate with peer teams across Developer Experience, Infrastructure Platforms, and product groups to align priorities and timing.
• Lead AI-first development practices in how we build and what we ship, including AI skills and agent-assisted performance workflows.
• Mentor engineers in performance engineering, platform design, and technical decision-making.
• Serve as a performance expert for other teams and provide technical guidance on initiatives spanning multiple groups.
• Take part in on-call or operational support where your team's ownership model requires it.

What you'll need

• Staff-level backend or platform engineering experience, including setting technical direction across a team and the teams around it.
• A track record of building and operating performance testing and analysis systems, with an understanding of where bottlenecks appear and how to find them.
• Experience leading or anchoring a performance enablement or platform function and achieving measurable adoption of internal tooling by influencing engineers and leaders who don't report to you.
• Experience defining and delivering a multi-quarter technical strategy or roadmap with engineering leadership.
• An AI-first development mindset demonstrated across the software lifecycle, including shaping how a team uses AI.
• Hands-on experience with load and performance testing tools such as k6 or equivalent, Kubernetes, and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or similar cloud infrastructure.
• Clear written, asynchronous communication, including explaining performance trade-offs to engineers and leadership.

Details

• Remote, Poland.
• Poland base salary range: zł 328,000 - zł 492,000. The base salary range does not include bonuses, equity, or benefits.
• Base salary range applies to residents of the EU, in the specified country or countries only.
• All GitLab roles are remote; some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements.