Senior Backend Engineer, Analytics Instrumentation (Golang)

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll lead the design and development of a unified, Go-based instrumentation service that consolidates analytics instrumentation across GitLab's engineering organization. You'll architect and own critical backend systems that help the company understand customer usage patterns across GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed deployment environments. That data directly informs strategic product decisions. This role offers the opportunity to build foundational infrastructure that simplifies instrumentation for every team at GitLab, replacing the complexity of multiple language-specific SDKs with a single, unified solution that all teams can rely on.

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.
• Own the responsibility for handling the sending, transit, and quality of instrumentation data across the system, ensuring data integrity that directly impacts the company's strategic decision-making and usage billing accuracy.
• Train and support product development teams across the company on how to instrument their features using the unified service, providing documentation, guidance, and technical support.
• Manage on-call responsibilities during working hours for systems responsible for usage billing and instrumentation, ensuring system reliability and quick response to critical issues.
• Lead collaboration across research and development teams and the enterprise data organization to understand requirements and deliver solutions that serve multiple stakeholders.
• Make strategic 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 collaborative, 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 is helpful, along with Ruby on Rails experience.

About the team

Our team is part of the Data Engineering organization and operates as a foundational service supporting all research and development teams at GitLab. We're responsible for consolidating and managing the systems that handle instrumentation data sending, transit, and quality across the entire company. Our work directly enables company strategy and decision-making by providing visibility into customer usage patterns across different product offerings and customer types (GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed deployment environments). This work supports usage billing and product decisions. 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 we ensure data integrity for billing and analysis. As a distributed team working asynchronously across multiple time zones, we collaborate closely with product and engineering teams across the company and provide training and support to help them instrument their features effectively.