Backend Engineer, Database Excellence (Ruby)

An overview of this role

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer in the Database Excellence group, you'll develop and enhance the frameworks, patterns, and tooling that keep GitLab's application datastores scalable, healthy, and safe across GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed instances. You'll work closely with experienced engineers and cross-functional teams to build reliable backend features, learn best practices in data architecture and lifecycle management, and contribute to identifying and addressing performance improvements in our infrastructure. As part of the Data Engineering organization, you'll gain hands-on experience with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in an all-remote, highly collaborative environment where you'll receive mentorship and grow your skills in data scalability and system design.

Some examples of our projects:

• SQL Traffic Replay Tooling
• Background Operations Framework

What you'll do

• Develop and iterate backend features and data frameworks that make it safe and efficient to work with data at scale across GitLab.com and self-managed deployments.
• Collaborate with product management, UX, frontend, infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics teams to design and ship high-performing, reliable solutions.
• Review and improve database-related changes from other engineers and external contributors to ensure data integrity, safety, and performance across diverse environments.
• Design, build, and maintain tooling such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks to proactively detect and address scalability and performance issues.
• Research, design, and implement improvements to database performance, scalability, and data health, including areas like soft delete strategies and database migration testing.
• Document database best practices, anti-patterns, and data architecture guidance so developers can make informed, consistent decisions.
• Create proactive tooling and guardrails that help developers detect and remediate potential performance and data issues early in the development lifecycle.

What you'll bring

• Professional software engineering experience working with PostgreSQL in large, complex production environments, including performance tuning and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails or another Ruby framework, with experience designing, implementing, and reviewing backend features and services.
• Ability to reason about software design, algorithms, and performance trade-offs at a system level, especially in data-intensive applications.
• Strong written communication skills and comfort working asynchronously in an all-remote, distributed team.
• Self-directed work style with effective organizational skills and the ability to manage priorities as a "manager of one."
• Alignment with GitLab's values, including transparency, collaboration, inclusion, and contribution to open source practices.
• Openness to learning and applying new tools and approaches, including transferable experience from related data, infrastructure, or developer tooling domains.

About the team

The Database Excellence Group is a remote, agile backend team within the Data Engineering organization that builds and maintains the frameworks, patterns, and tooling that enable GitLab teams to work confidently with data at scale across all application datastores. We focus on data scalability, health, and developer enablement for both GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed deployments, partnering closely with infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics stages to ensure data changes are safe, performant, and compatible across diverse environments. We are independent, self-organized contributors who collaborate asynchronously across regions, and we are currently expanding our mission from proactively identifying and addressing saturation points in GitLab.com infrastructure to also delivering new scalability features and data health initiatives for self-managed customers.