Backend Engineer, Analytics Instrumentation

Our team is part of the Data Engineering organization at GitLab, responsible for a foundational service used by all research and development teams. We manage the systems for sending, transporting, and validating instrumentation data across the company, providing insights into customer usage patterns across GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed environments. This data is vital for usage billing and product planning. We are developing a unified, Go-based instrumentation service to replace multiple language-specific SDKs, simplifying feature instrumentation and ensuring data integrity for billing and analysis. As a distributed, asynchronous team across multiple time zones, we collaborate closely with product and engineering teams, offering guidance on effective feature instrumentation.

Introduction

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer, you will be instrumental in designing and developing backend systems that track customer usage patterns across GitLab's SaaS and Self-Managed deployments. This crucial data directly influences product decisions. The role focuses on building foundational infrastructure to simplify and enhance the reliability of instrumentation for all GitLab teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain a unified Go-based instrumentation service to consolidate instrumentation across the company, replacing multiple language-specific SDKs while ensuring reliability and performance.
• Manage the sending, transit, and quality of instrumentation data across the system, guaranteeing data integrity for accurate prioritization and usage billing.
• Train and support product development teams across GitLab on instrumenting their features using the unified service, providing documentation, guidance, and technical assistance.
• Handle on-call duties during working hours for systems related to usage billing and instrumentation, ensuring system reliability and swift response to critical issues.
• Collaborate with research and development teams and the enterprise data organization to gather requirements and deliver solutions that cater to diverse stakeholders.
• Make critical architectural decisions that balance the needs of product teams (ease of use) with data consumers (reliability and correctness), establishing the system as a foundational service for the company.

Requirements

• Proficiency in the Go programming language, with proven experience building and maintaining production services.
• Strong backend development experience, capable of designing scalable, reliable systems for internal and external customers.
• Experience with infrastructure concerns, including system reliability, performance at scale, data quality, and observability.
• Proficient in designing and building APIs (e.g., REST, gRPC) for integration by other teams.
• Experience working effectively in cross-functional teams with product teams, data consumers, and other internal stakeholders.
• Experience with instrumentation, analytics, data systems, or similar foundational infrastructure in application environments like Ruby on Rails or comparable stacks.

About Company

Our team is part of the Data Engineering organization at GitLab, responsible for a foundational service used by all research and development teams. We manage the systems for sending, transporting, and validating instrumentation data across the company, providing insights into customer usage patterns across GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed environments. This data is vital for usage billing and product planning. We are developing a unified, Go-based instrumentation service to replace multiple language-specific SDKs, simplifying feature instrumentation and ensuring data integrity for billing and analysis. As a distributed, asynchronous team across multiple time zones, we collaborate closely with product and engineering teams, offering guidance on effective feature instrumentation.