Intermediate Backend Engineer (Ruby), Plan: Project Management
About the Role
We are looking for an Intermediate Backend Engineer to join our Plan:Project Management team, part of the broader Plan Stage. In this role, you'll work on diverse challenges—from feature development to scalability and performance optimization. You'll collaborate closely with frontend and backend engineers, UX designers, and product managers distributed across multiple time zones around the globe. You'll help shape the future of the GitLab Agile Planning offering and how thousands of users manage projects to enable their teams to plan and execute work effectively. What You'll Do
Collaborate closely with Product and Design counterparts to finalize the requirements and break down projects into smaller iterations.
Collaborate with other engineers to plan and execute the work.
Collaborate with engineers across Plan Stage on larger projects.
Create Proof of Concepts for more complex work. Ensure quality by writing extensive tests, and roll out changes.
Iterate and ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members.
Craft code that meets our standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment.
Support other engineers and advocate for quality during code-reviews.
Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team (“technical debt”), propose and implement solutions as part of our Engineering Backlog Rotation
Nurture our open-source community by selecting and preparing issues for contributors, helping to organize hackathons, and reviewing contributions.
Suggest and execute process improvements in monthly retrospectives.
What You'll Bring
Professional experience with Ruby on Rails
Experience in PostgreSQL database design and optimization
Experience in REST API and GraphQL development
Experience working with a platform or complex application (Large scale is a bonus).
Familiarity with distributed, scalable and reliable systems.
Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.
Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders
Experience working in a highly agile, iterative software development process.
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.
Nice-to-haves (but not required)
Knowledge of Elasticsearch and NoSQL database technologies
Experience with GitLab CI/CD workflows
Computer science education or equivalent experience
Open source contributions
About the team
You’ll be joining a team of 8 engineers composed of Intermediate, Senior, Staff and Principal engineers as well as cross functional counterparts. Plan:Project Management team owns features and frameworks like Work Items, Service Desk, Labels, Milestones, Iterations, Todos, Notifications, Integrations and much more. Our focus is to enable teams to plan and execute work effectively. We work closely with other 2 groups - Plan:Product Planning and Plan:Knowledge - that compose the GitLab Plan Stage. We also often collaborate with stages across the Core DevOps Organization.
As the Backend Engineer, you will work on many highly requested features as well as maintaining the existing features. You’ll get to know our codebase, roadmap, and working methods. You will be empowered to take ownership and drive the implementation of the prioritized features or defects. You’ll help the team and community via code review, issue refinement, engaging with users and open-source contributors on public issues and merge requests, and advocating for process improvements.
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Intermediate Backend Engineer (Ruby), Plan: Project Management
About the Role
We are looking for an Intermediate Backend Engineer to join our Plan:Project Management team, part of the broader Plan Stage. In this role, you'll work on diverse challenges—from feature development to scalability and performance optimization. You'll collaborate closely with frontend and backend engineers, UX designers, and product managers distributed across multiple time zones around the globe. You'll help shape the future of the GitLab Agile Planning offering and how thousands of users manage projects to enable their teams to plan and execute work effectively. What You'll Do
Collaborate closely with Product and Design counterparts to finalize the requirements and break down projects into smaller iterations.
Collaborate with other engineers to plan and execute the work.
Collaborate with engineers across Plan Stage on larger projects.
Create Proof of Concepts for more complex work. Ensure quality by writing extensive tests, and roll out changes.
Iterate and ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members.
Craft code that meets our standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment.
Support other engineers and advocate for quality during code-reviews.
Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team (“technical debt”), propose and implement solutions as part of our Engineering Backlog Rotation
Nurture our open-source community by selecting and preparing issues for contributors, helping to organize hackathons, and reviewing contributions.
Suggest and execute process improvements in monthly retrospectives.
What You'll Bring
Professional experience with Ruby on Rails
Experience in PostgreSQL database design and optimization
Experience in REST API and GraphQL development
Experience working with a platform or complex application (Large scale is a bonus).
Familiarity with distributed, scalable and reliable systems.
Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.
Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders
Experience working in a highly agile, iterative software development process.
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.
Nice-to-haves (but not required)
Knowledge of Elasticsearch and NoSQL database technologies
Experience with GitLab CI/CD workflows
Computer science education or equivalent experience
Open source contributions
About the team
You’ll be joining a team of 8 engineers composed of Intermediate, Senior, Staff and Principal engineers as well as cross functional counterparts. Plan:Project Management team owns features and frameworks like Work Items, Service Desk, Labels, Milestones, Iterations, Todos, Notifications, Integrations and much more. Our focus is to enable teams to plan and execute work effectively. We work closely with other 2 groups - Plan:Product Planning and Plan:Knowledge - that compose the GitLab Plan Stage. We also often collaborate with stages across the Core DevOps Organization.
As the Backend Engineer, you will work on many highly requested features as well as maintaining the existing features. You’ll get to know our codebase, roadmap, and working methods. You will be empowered to take ownership and drive the implementation of the prioritized features or defects. You’ll help the team and community via code review, issue refinement, engaging with users and open-source contributors on public issues and merge requests, and advocating for process improvements.
