An overview of this role
As a Senior Backend Engineer on the GitLab CD team, you'll help build a next-generation Continuous Deployment engine from the ground up. This is a greenfield initiative within GitLab's Deploy stage — the work goes well beyond script execution. You'll build systems that bring true reconciliation, live state awareness, durable orchestration, and AI-native governance to GitLab's platform.
You'll take end-to-end ownership of complex features, help establish architectural patterns for a brand-new codebase, and collaborate closely with engineers across the Deploy stage and adjacent teams in Verify, Runner, and Infrastructure. This is a high-visibility area of the product at the intersection of GitLab's core platform and its AI strategy.
What you'll do
- Design and develop features for the CD platform that are secure, well-tested, and high-performance, with a focus on distributed systems architecture in Go.
- Take end-to-end ownership of features from design through implementation, code review, deployment, and iterative refinement.
- Contribute to architectural decisions on a greenfield codebase, partnering with the Engineering Manager and Principal Engineer to assess feasibility and scope.
- Advocate for product quality, security, and performance improvements with impact across the team, and help define standards through active code review.
- Provide mentorship to junior and intermediate engineers, helping them grow and remove blockers to their autonomy.
- Collaborate with cross-functional partners — Product Management, UX, adjacent engineering teams — to deliver against product commitments.
- Participate in on-call rotations to assist with troubleshooting and urgent engineering issues.
What you'll bring
- Significant professional experience building backend services in Go, applying Go best practices in production environments.
- Demonstrated ability to design and build scalable, distributed systems — particularly those involving durable workflow execution, state persistence, and replay patterns.
- Experience building or contributing to release orchestration, deployment automation, or continuous delivery systems at scale.
- Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production, including deploying and operating services across diverse environments.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes deployment patterns and progressive delivery strategies such as blue/green and canary deployments.
- Familiarity with GitOps workflows and tools in that ecosystem.
- Experience with event-driven architectures and policy-based governance in building reliable, enterprise-grade delivery systems.
- Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI tools into daily engineering workflows to drive efficiency and deliver higher quality outcomes.
- Strong communication skills: able to clearly convey complex technical and architectural problems, achieve consensus with peers, and collaborate effectively in an async-first, globally distributed environment.
- Self-motivated and self-managing, with a positive, solution-oriented mindset and the ability to thrive in a fully remote organization.
Nice to have
- Experience with AI engineering or building AI-integrated product features.
- Ruby on Rails experience.
About the team
The GitLab CD team is a newly formed group within the Deploy stage. The team will be primarily Go engineers, with Ruby on Rails and frontend engineers joining as the product matures. You will work closely with adjacent teams across Verify, Runner, and Infrastructure, building in a collaborative, async-first environment where engineers take real ownership of outcomes. This is an exciting opportunity to shape something new within an established company operating at significant scale.
