Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails), Plan: Planning Views

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p>GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.</p> <p>The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values&nbsp;and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZIb5zszQI">Co-create the future with us</a> as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.</p> <p>*<em>Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.</em></p></div><h2>An overview of this role</h2> <p>We're looking for an experienced Product Engineer who cares deeply about users and has full stack experience, with a current focus on backend. You'll spend as much time understanding what users need and shaping how features should work as you do building them. You'll work directly with the product manager, engage with users on our public issue tracker and support tickets, and collaborate with contributors.</p> <p>You'll be deeply involved in the backend architecture that powers the work items platform. This system has to serve millions of work items in a single user's view across tens of thousands of groups and projects.</p> <p>We provide access to Claude Code and other agentic tools and encourage responsible agentic development. We also build our own artificial intelligence (AI) features by integrating GitLab Duo with the work items platform, so experience developing AI features is a strong plus.</p> <h2>What you’ll do</h2> <ul> <li value="1">Collaborate closely with Product to shape requirements and break projects into shippable iterations. Work with other engineers to plan and complete the work.</li> <li value="2">Design and implement backend features across the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and real-time subscriptions, with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and user impact.</li> <li value="3">Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale by optimizing queries and writes, denormalizing and partitioning tables, and moving workloads to Elasticsearch or ClickHouse where appropriate. The work items framework serves as the foundation for some of the highest-traffic surfaces in GitLab.</li> <li value="4">Contribute to real-time features that keep work item information current as it changes.</li> <li value="5">Create proofs of concept for complex work. Ensure quality through extensive testing and safe rollouts behind feature flags.</li> <li value="6">Mentor engineers and open source contributors through code reviews, pairing, feedback, issue preparation, and contribution reviews.</li> <li value="7">Participate in on-call rotations to troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve observability.</li> <li value="8">Improve the developer experience for yourself and your team, including test infrastructure, the review process, retrospectives, and how we work together.</li> </ul> <h2>What you’ll bring</h2> <ul> <li value="1">A strong product mindset. You care about what users are trying to do. You hold strong opinions from the user perspective, listen to peers, and negotiate trade-offs with product managers and users.</li> <li value="2">Experience leading and supporting other engineers. You've driven projects involving several engineers over months. You care about your teammates' growth and give it your time through thoughtful code reviews, regular feedback, support for career development, hiring, and mentoring contributors.</li> <li value="3">Full stack experience with a current backend focus, including proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails and experience maintaining backend features in a large, mature codebase.</li> <li value="4">Strong PostgreSQL skills and experience improving PostgreSQL performance at scale, including query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, and partitioning.</li> <li value="5">Experience designing and evolving GraphQL and/or REST APIs, with attention to scalability, backward compatibility, and clear contracts with frontend clients.</li> <li value="6">Experience improving large automated test suites, with a focus on the performance and reliability of the tests themselves.</li> <li value="7">Strong written and verbal communication skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.</li> <li value="8">Experience integrating AI into development workflows or developing AI-powered features, or working with Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python, is a plus.</li> </ul> <h2>About the team</h2> <p>The Planning Views group is part of GitLab's Plan stage. We build the planning experience in GitLab. We're unifying the user experience across work item lists, agile boards, roadmaps, and grid views while building the work items platform underneath them. We're currently working on agile boards. Our work serves every GitLab customer who plans and tracks work and provides a foundation for other Plan stage initiatives, such as Configurable Work Item Types.</p> <p>We're a team of four engineers: on