Intermediate Backend Engineer - Software Delivery: Release

The Software Delivery Section, part of the Infrastructure Platforms Department, is dedicated to enhancing the safety, reliability, and overall customer experience of GitLab’s complete software delivery process. We aim to provide seamless and efficient delivery of GitLab products across all platforms, including SaaS multi-tenant, self-managed, and SaaS single-tenant environments. Our primary goals are to accelerate delivery cycles, minimize incidents, and ensure high-quality releases that consistently meet and exceed customer expectations. By focusing on these objectives, we aim to improve GitLab’s end-to-end software delivery process, making it more reliable, efficient, and aligned with the needs of our users.

Responsibilities

Backend Engineers with the Software Delivery:Release bring not only a strong background in backend development but also a solid understanding of, or keen interest in, infrastructure and operations. In this role, you will work alongside Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to enhance release management tooling, infrastructure, and processes. While SREs approach these responsibilities from an operational standpoint, Backend Engineers provide a software development perspective, collaborating closely to deliver efficient and safe solutions for streamlined code delivery across various supported environments. This role is ideal for individuals with a strong coding background who are also comfortable working on infrastructure, automation and operations-related topics or are motivated to develop expertise in these areas.

• Guarantee the GitLab Release Process

• Create new tools and frameworks to automate the release process

• Build new GitLab release features to replace existing custom tooling

• Work with individual teams on defining and implementing solutions that will help them release quicker

• Create frameworks that allow engineers to write code that scales with demand

• Help teams instrument their code and helps recognize parts of code that could benefit from increased observability

• Work closely with peer Infrastructure Platforms groups to control the impact of application code running in user facing products

• Help communicate the release schedule clearly with others

• Develop monitoring and alerting to measure release process velocity

• Identify process bottlenecks and introduce optimizations

• Participate in Release Manager rotation

Requirements

As an ideal candidate, you will have 

• Strong coding background. Proficiency with Ruby is a strong plus. Ruby on Rails knowledge is not mandatory

• Experience working on large-scale systems

• Experience optimizing Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment pipelines as well as the tooling and processes that go with them

• Interest in cloud platforms, containerization, and Infrastructure as Code tools

• Application and systems observability background

• Collaboration mindset, boundless curiosity and a demonstrable ability to learn

• A product development mindset when developing new components

 You share our values, and work in accordance with those values.

Performance indicators

The Delivery team has the following performance indicators:

• Mean Time to Production