Staff Backend Engineer, Software Supply Chain Security: Secrets Management

An overview of this role

You'll join GitLab's Software Supply Chain Security stage as the Staff Engineer, Secrets Management, providing technical leadership for GitLab's strategic investment in integrated secrets management. You'll set the technical direction for GitLab Secrets Manager, our OpenBao-powered solution that helps customers securely store, distribute, and manage the lifecycle of secrets used across CI/CD pipelines. This role sits at the intersection of the GitLab platform and the OpenBao open source project: you'll drive architecture decisions for multi-tenant secrets management at scale, guide integration into GitLab, and contribute upstream so we can deliver capabilities customers can trust.

In your first year, your success will look like a clear, scalable architecture for GitLab Secrets Manager, reliable performance that meets GitLab.com needs in partnership with Infrastructure teams, and strong cross-team alignment across Pipeline Security, Authentication, and Platform. You'll also represent GitLab in OpenBao's governance and technical discussions, helping ensure our product direction and upstream contributions reinforce each other.

How we interview

Our process includes technical interviews and stakeholder conversations focused on how you partner across functions and drive alignment.

You should expect questions about how you collaborate with cross-functional partners and communicate tradeoffs in ambiguous, high-impact work.

What you'll do

• Lead the technical strategy for GitLab Secrets Manager, setting architecture direction for secure, multi-tenant secrets management at scale.
• Own the integration between GitLab and OpenBao, including namespaces, authentication mechanisms, and policy management.
• Collaborate with Pipeline Security, Authentication, and Platform teams to propose, review, and deliver cross-team secrets management improvements.
• Partner with GitLab.com Infrastructure teams to ensure secrets management meets reliability, performance, and operational requirements.
• Represent GitLab in the OpenBao open source project by contributing features upstream, participating in technical steering discussions, and maintaining strong technical credibility.
• Mentor and advise engineers on secrets management, cryptographic systems, and secure architecture patterns, raising the quality and consistency of designs and implementations.
• Interface with engineering managers and senior leadership to scope initiatives, clarify tradeoffs, and unblock delivery across teams.
• Engage with customers and external stakeholders to understand real-world needs and communicate GitLab's secrets management capabilities and roadmap direction.

What you'll bring

• Experience designing and operating secrets management systems (for example, HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao, or cloud-native offerings), including secure storage, access control, and audit logging.
• Ability to lead architecture decisions for resilient, multi-tenant services that handle secrets operations at scale, including high availability and cluster management patterns.
• Working knowledge of cryptographic and key management concepts, such as encryption in transit and at rest, key derivation, and hardware security module (HSM) or PKCS#11 integrations.
• Experience implementing authentication and authorization integrations, such as JSON Web Token (JWT) or OpenID Connect (OIDC), mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS), and certificate-based authentication.
• Proficiency building product integrations in Go (within the OpenBao or Vault ecosystem) and Ruby on Rails for GitLab platform integration.
• Experience contributing to open source projects and working effectively with distributed governance, balancing upstream needs with product requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to operate with high autonomy, drive strategy, and serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders (including constructively challenging assumptions and tradeoffs).
• Strong communication and collaboration skills to influence across teams and levels, including mentoring engineers and working in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

About the team

The Secrets Management team sits within the Pipeline Security group in GitLab's Software Supply Chain Security stage. We own GitLab Secrets Manager, an OpenBao-powered capability that helps teams securely store, distribute, and manage the lifecycle of secrets used across continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. The team works closely with Authentication, Authorization, Compliance, and Platform counterparts to deliver secure defaults, reliable operations for GitLab.com, and product-grade integration between GitLab and OpenBao (including namespaces, authentication, and policy management). Our core challenge is building multi-tenant secrets management at scale while balancing upstream open source collaboration with the needs of GitLab customers.