Senior Backend Engineer (C), Tenant Scale: Git

The Tenant Scale: Git team at GitLab focuses on the Git capabilities underpinning repository access, working closely with Gitaly and the upstream Git project. The team contributes directly to open-source Git, optimizes GitLab’s use of Git in production, and guides technical direction in areas like performance, correctness, and maintainability. Team members collaborate asynchronously across regions, balancing internal engineering demands with active participation in public open-source discussions. More information on this domain can be found on the Team Direction Page.

Introduction

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Tenant Scale: Git team at GitLab, you will be instrumental in improving Git, a fundamental open-source technology for software development. This role focuses on enhancing Git and Gitaly to be more capable, reliable, and efficient for GitLab's platform and its users. You will contribute directly to upstream Git, influence technical direction, and bridge open-source discussions with GitLab's product needs.

Responsibilities

• Participate in architectural discussions and technical decisions related to Git and Gitaly, guiding implementation choices for improved correctness, performance, and maintainability.
• Contribute features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements to upstream Git, aligning with team and community goals to enhance repository access and reliability.
• Adapt Gitaly to effectively leverage Git capabilities, integrating new features to optimize scalability, efficiency, and long-term maintainability.
• Connect discussions from the open-source Git project with GitLab’s product direction and engineering efforts, ensuring alignment between upstream contributions and product/platform needs.
• Scope tasks, estimate effort, and create implementation plans to support team priorities and ensure predictable delivery of technical work.
• Rigorously test and validate built and integrated features, emphasizing correctness and reliability to minimize regressions and support stable production use.
• Collaborate with team members, contributors, and the broader Git ecosystem.
• Represent GitLab as a constructive participant in the open-source community, fostering productive relationships for ongoing collaboration with the Git community.

Requirements

• Experience building instrumented, observable software systems.
• Knowledge of Git internals, including its code and data structures, or practical experience operating Git servers.
• Experience writing and testing production-quality code in C.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects, including Git or similar systems, and effective work in public collaboration spaces.
• Familiarity with Go for backend development.
• Understanding of Linux internals such as processes, memory management, input/output, and filesystems.
• Interest or experience in large-scale or distributed systems, storage formats, graph theory, or highly available production environments, including transferable backend or infrastructure experience.

About Company

The Tenant Scale: Git team at GitLab focuses on the Git capabilities underpinning repository access, working closely with Gitaly and the upstream Git project. The team contributes directly to open-source Git, optimizes GitLab’s use of Git in production, and guides technical direction in areas like performance, correctness, and maintainability. Team members collaborate asynchronously across regions, balancing internal engineering demands with active participation in public open-source discussions. More information on this domain can be found on the Team Direction Page.