Staff Backend Engineer (Go), Events Platform

Job description

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software. *Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab. An overview of this role As a Staff Backend Engineer on GitLab's Events & Messaging Platform team, you'll be a foundational technical leader on a high-visibility infrastructure initiative that sits underneath nearly everything GitLab ships. GitLab runs two separate systems for async work today — Sidekiq for short-lived background jobs and a purpose-built event bus for longer-running workflows. This role consolidates both into a single durable, scalable messaging and event-processing platform that powers GitLab's first-party products and underpins third-party integrations like webhooks and external triggers. You'll bridge architecture and execution — owning the design of a genuinely multi-tenant distributed system, breaking it into work the team can deliver, and solving the hard problems along the way. You'll bring strong instincts around durability, tenant isolation, and horizontal scalability — telling a design that's durable from one that only looks durable under light load — and own reliability end to end. A defining challenge is migrating existing production workloads off the legacy systems without disrupting the traffic they carry. What you'll do • Lead technical execution on the CD platform: decompose complex architectural designs into well-scoped, deliverable work and drive the team to ship with quality and confidence. • Solve high-complexity engineering problems and contribute architectural feedback that shapes how the system evolves. • Set and maintain the technical bar across the codebase through code review, mentorship, and example. • Mentor engineers at all levels, helping them grow their technical capabilities and navigate difficult problems. • Represent the CD team in cross-functional engineering discussions and contribute to written technical proposals and architectural documents. • Participate in on-call rotations to help ensure GitLab.com availability targets are met. What you'll bring • Deep professional experience building backend services in Go, with a track record in high-scale production environments. • Demonstrated expertise in distributed systems design, including durable workflow execution, state persistence, and event-driven architectures. • Extensive experience leading or contributing to release orchestration, deployment automation, or continuous delivery systems at scale. • Extensive hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes at production scale, including progressive delivery patterns such as blue/green and canary deployments. • Strong familiarity with GitOps workflows and tools in that ecosystem. • Experience with policy-based governance in software delivery systems. • Proven ability to translate complex architecture into clear, executable engineering work across a team. • Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI tools into daily engineering workflows to drive efficiency and quality. • Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a bias toward async, documentation-first practices. • Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational judgment and a constructive approach to ambiguity. Nice to have • Experience with AI engineering or building AI-integrated product features. • Ruby on Rails experience. About the team The Events & Messaging Platform team is being built out within GitLab's Infrastructure Platforms org to take on one of the most foundational rebuilds on the platform. You'll work closely with the product and integration teams that consume it, shaping your guarantees around what they actually need, in a collaborative, async-first environment where engineers own outcomes. With the platform spanning Self-Managed, Dedicated, and SaaS, you'll reason about reliability across every way GitLab is deployed — a rare chance to define the technical foundation nearly all of GitLab depends on. How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees • Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being<