Backend Engineer, Analytics Instrumentation (Golang)

An overview of this role

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer, you'll guide the design and development of backend systems that help the company identify customer usage patterns across GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed deployments. That data informs product decisions. This role offers the opportunity to build foundational infrastructure that makes instrumentation simpler and more reliable for teams at GitLab.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and maintain a unified Go-based instrumentation service that consolidates instrumentation across the entire company, eliminating the need for multiple language-specific SDKs while maintaining reliability and performance.
• Manage the handling of the sending, transit, and quality of instrumentation data across the system, ensuring data integrity that directly impacts the company's key prioritization and usage billing accuracy.
• Train and assist product development teams across the company on how to instrument their features using the unified service, providing documentation, guidance, and technical help.
• Manage on-call duties during working hours for systems that handle usage billing and instrumentation, ensuring system reliability and quick response to critical issues.
• Work across research and development teams and the enterprise data organization to identify requirements and deliver solutions that serve multiple stakeholders.
• Make key architectural decisions that balance the needs of product teams (who need ease of use) with data consumers (who need reliability and correctness), ensuring the system serves as a foundational service for the company.

What you’ll bring

• Proficiency in the Go programming language, with experience building and maintaining production services.
• Strong backend development experience, with the ability to design scalable, reliable systems serving internal and external customers.
• Experience with infrastructure concerns such as system reliability, performance at scale, data quality, and observability.
• Experience designing and building APIs (REST, gRPC, or similar) that other teams integrate with.
• Experience working in cross-functional teams with product teams, data consumers, and other internal stakeholders across team boundaries.
• Experience with instrumentation, analytics, data systems, or similar foundational infrastructure in application environments such as Ruby on Rails or comparable stacks.

About the team

Our team is part of the Data Engineering organization and runs a foundational service used by all research and development teams at GitLab. We manage the systems that send, transport, and validate instrumentation data across the company, giving us visibility into customer usage patterns across GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed deployment environments. This data informs usage billing and product planning. We're building a unified, Go-based instrumentation service that replaces multiple language-specific SDKs, making it easier for teams to instrument their features while ensuring data integrity for billing and analysis. As a distributed team working asynchronously across multiple time zones, we work closely with product and engineering teams across the company and provide guidance on instrumenting features effectively.