Intermediate Backend Engineer, Verify: Runner Core

An overview of this role

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer on our Verify: Runner Core group within the Verify: Runner organization, you'll help build and evolve GitLab Runner, the interface between GitLab and our customers' CI infrastructure. Whether jobs run on Kubernetes clusters, cloud VMs, or on-premises hardware, GitLab Runner makes it happen. Each week, Runners process millions of jobs for GitLab.com, and our container images are downloaded hundreds of millions of times.

You'll collaborate on technical initiatives and contribute to design and implementation, taking on work that matches your experience while growing your impact over time. You'll learn from how customers use our CI/CD capabilities and use that insight to help the team solve real-world scaling and reliability challenges. This input can come from bug reports, customer escalations, or feedback on executor behavior and performance. GitLab Runner users often have demanding CI/CD requirements, and many rely on the infrastructure you help build as a mission-critical part of their software delivery workflows.

Here's a glimpse of some of the things we're working on and where we're headed:

• Job Routing: Transforming GitLab Runner's job scheduling from HTTP polling to intelligent, server-mediated routing that enables runner prioritization, admission control, and distributed autoscaling coordination.
• We've already kicked this off with Admission Control, and you could contribute to its iteration.
• Externalizing CI: Transforming GitLab CI from static YAML configuration to dynamic, programmable pipelines where jobs can create other jobs at runtime.
• Job Volume Mounts: Enabling CI jobs to mount GitLab repositories and artifacts as filesystem volumes, providing instant, lightweight access to multi-repository content without full git clones.

What you'll do

• Design and develop features and improvements for GitLab Runner that are secure, well-tested, and high-performance, with a focus on strong architecture in Go services, appropriate for an intermediate-level engineer.
• Partner with the Product Manager and other Senior Engineers to assess the technical feasibility and scope of Runner-related feature requests, contributing your perspective and asking clarifying questions.
• Contribute to architectural decisions that modernize Runner's technology stack, favoring solutions that address root causes over fixes that treat symptoms.

• Take end-to-end ownership of your features from design through implementation, code review, deployment, monitoring, and iterative refinement.
• Collaborate closely with other engineers on the team and within the Runner Organization through code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing, both learning from others and helping raise the overall technical bar.
• Work with cross-functional partners, including Support and Product, to help diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve customer issues related to GitLab Runner and CI Functions, and feed those learnings back into the product.
• Engage with GitLab Runner's vibrant open-source community by triaging bug reports, reviewing community-contributed merge requests, and helping contributors succeed.
• Participate in team rotations including bug triage, community contribution reviews, and support escalation response.

What you'll bring

• Proficiency in developing backend services in Go and applying Go best practices in production, whether gained through professional work, open-source contributions, or other hands-on experience.

• Ability to design and build scalable, distributed, and resilient systems that can grow with increasing demand, ideally with exposure to high-throughput CI pipelines, job orchestration, or similar infrastructure.
• Hands-on skills with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, including deploying and operating services that run CI workloads across diverse environments.
• Ability to analyze, profile, and optimize performance in distributed systems using appropriate tools and observability data, especially for latency-sensitive and resource-intensive CI execution paths.
• Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure (for example, a major cloud provider or infrastructure-as-code tools) and concepts related to site reliability and operating SaaS platforms that run large-scale CI.
• Comfort with asynchronous communication and proactive written updates, essential for collaborating effectively across a globally distributed team.
• Strong collaboration skills, including working closely with other engineers, contributing to shared technical practices, participating in code reviews, and communicating clearly with cross-functional partners like Product and Support.

About the team

The Verify: Runner Core team at GitLab sits within the Verify: Runner organization and is responsible for GitLab Runner. We focus on Runner's core architecture, executor implementations, scalability, and reliability. The team operates across multiple time zones, so async communication is core to how we work.

We work closely with the CI Functions Platform team, within the Runner organization. The two teams collaborate regularly and share roadmap initiatives. This close partnership means you'll have opportunities to contribute to work that affects both teams.