Intermediate Backend Engineer

An overview of this role

The Create:Code Review Backend team is responsible for all backend aspects of the Code Review Workflow and GitLab CLI product categories. We work primarily on the Merge Requests features of GitLab.

As a Backend Engineer in Create:Code Review, you will play a critical role in developing and maintaining the backend systems that power Merge Requests, ensuring accuracy, reliability, and speed. Merge Requests being a core feature of the GitLab platform, you will work on building scalable, high-performance systems that support our customers with collaboration and iteration. Your contributions will directly impact the code review process for our clients, helping them improve code quality while optimizing for the speed at which code is delivered.

Some examples of our projects: 

• Duo Code Review - leveraging AI for automated code reviews

• Cells 1.0 - horizontally scaling the largest tables in the GitLab.com database

• Stacked Diffs for the CLI - introducing new development workflows

• Improved DevSecOps experience in Merge Requests - integrating features natively within merge requests

• Rapid Diffs - improving performance of diffs rendering

What You’ll Do

• Develop features and improvements to the GitLab product in a secure, well-tested, and performant way.

• Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders within Engineering (Frontend, UX, etc.) to maintain a high bar for quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment.

• Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance.

• Solve technical problems of moderate scope and complexity.

• Craft code that meets our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment.

• Conduct Code Review within our Code Review Guidelines and ensure community contributions receive a swift response.

• Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team (“technical debt”), propose and implement solutions.

• Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around specific projects and community contributions.

• Ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.

• Participate in Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday and weekend and occasional night on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

What You’ll Bring

• Significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails.

• Professional experience with PostgreSQL or a comparable RDBMS.

• Professional experience with Sidekiq.

• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.

• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions.

• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems.

• Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process.

• Demonstrated ability to onboard and integrate with an organization long-term.

• Positive and solution-oriented mindset.

• Effective communication skills: Regularly achieve consensus with peers, and clear status updates.

• An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility.

• Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.

• Self-motivated and self-managing, with excellent organizational skills.

• Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization.

• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.

• Ability to thrive in a fully remote organization.

• Ability to use GitLab.

• Comfort and familiarity with our code review process.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with JavaScript and associated web technologies (CSS, semantic HTML).

• Experience working with modern frontend frameworks (eg. React, Vue.js, Angular).

• Experience in a peak performance organization, preferably a tech startup.

• Experience with the GitLab product as a user or contributor.

• Product company experience.

• Experience working with a remote team.

• Enterprise software company experience.

• Developer platform/tool industry experience.

• Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team.

• Computer science education or equivalent experience.

• Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools.

About the team

Thanks to our Transparency value, you can see how we work in our team page. You can even see our roadmaps (Code Review Workflow, GitLab CLI) and listen to some of our meetings. 

The team is geographically dispersed across multiple time zones and we depend heavily on async communication. We collaborate closely with the Code Review Frontend team as part of the larger Code Review group.

How GitLab will support you

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being

• All remote, asynchronous work environment

• Flexible Paid Time Off

• Team Member Resource Groups

• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Growth and development budget 

• Parental leave 

• Home office support

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

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