Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby on Rails), Verify: Pipeline Execution

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the GitLab Verify:Pipeline Execution team, you'll help shape and scale the core of GitLab CI. You’ll work on the systems that power how pipelines are created, scheduled, and executed, building and improving features like pipeline schedules, merge trains, review apps, browser testing, and more. Your work will directly impact performance, reliability, and usability for users running millions of jobs, from small teams to the largest enterprises.

You’ll focus on maturing this critical area of the product by improving our large, complex Ruby on Rails monolith, with an emphasis on database performance, scalability, and code quality. In this role, you’ll lead initiatives that optimize high-throughput background processing, reduce technical debt, and evolve our architecture so GitLab CI remains a best-in-class solution. You’ll partner closely with other Verify teams, Product, and Infrastructure to design and deliver new capabilities, while ensuring existing features stay fast, secure, and dependable.

Some examples of our projects:

• Optimizing performance and scalability of the CI database, including strategies for our largest and fastest-growing tables
• Expanding merge train functionality to support new merge strategies and faster feedback cycles
• Improving pipeline execution speed and reliability across diverse workloads and configurations
• Reducing technical debt and addressing issues tied to missed service level objectives (SLOs) to improve overall product quality

What you'll do

• Write high-quality, efficient, and maintainable Ruby on Rails code that powers GitLab’s Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines, from scheduling and orchestration to execution and reporting.
• Lead improvements to the reliability, performance, and scalability of our CI pipeline execution domain, including optimizing database access patterns, background processing, and job orchestration for very high throughput workloads.
• Design, build, and iterate on features like merge trains, pipeline schedules, review apps, browser testing, and related CI capabilities that help customers ship secure software faster.
• Analyze and resolve complex production issues in a large, high-traffic monolith, driving structural changes that improve stability, reduce technical debt, and support zero-downtime deployments.
• Partner with product managers, frontend engineers, quality engineers, and other Verify teams to plan work, break down complex problems, and deliver end-to-end solutions that improve the CI user experience.
• Use PostgreSQL expertise to model data, tune queries, and scale large tables that support our CI features, including proactive performance investigations and remediation.
• Create and maintain clear, user-focused documentation and implementation guides that help GitLab users configure, troubleshoot, and get the most value from CI pipelines and related features.
• Provide technical leadership by driving architectural decisions in the CI domain, mentoring intermediate and junior engineers, and contributing to the long-term roadmap for Verify:Pipeline Execution.

What you'll bring

• Extensive experience building, running, and debugging backend services in high-traffic production environments, ideally working on CI, build, or workflow orchestration systems.
• Advanced proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails for designing and maintaining reliable, maintainable services in a large monolith codebase.
• Deep, hands-on experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL, including schema design, performance optimization, query tuning, and handling large-scale datasets.
• Proven track record improving the performance, scalability, and reliability of complex systems, including background and asynchronous job processing.
• Understanding of secure, scalable, and supportable architecture and deployment practices, including strategies for zero-downtime changes and safe rollouts.
• Familiarity with observability tools and patterns, such as metrics, logging, and tracing, to diagnose production issues and track system health and performance.
• Experience collaborating effectively in large codebases and working in distributed, cross-functional teams with product managers, designers, and other engineers.
• Ability to write clear, user-focused documentation and technical design proposals, and openness to applying your skills across adjacent backend domains like GraphQL, CI pipelines, or performance engineering.

About the team

The Verify:Pipeline Execution team sits within the Verify stage at GitLab. We're a globally distributed, all-remote group that works closely with Product Management, Frontend, Quality, and other Verify and Create teams across regions in an asynchronous way. We focus on collaboration, iteration, and helping GitLab users run fast, reliable, and scalable Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines for projects of all sizes, from small teams to large enterprises. For more on how we work, see Team Handbook Page and Related Initiative.