Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby or Golang), Tenant Scale; Cells Infrastructure

GitLab is a globally distributed, all-remote company that provides a complete DevOps platform. Their mission is to enable everyone to contribute. The Cells Infrastructure team specifically focuses on scaling GitLab.com horizontally to ensure reliability, low-latency performance, and safe growth.

Introduction

As a Senior Backend Engineer in Cells Infrastructure at GitLab, you will be instrumental in developing the core foundation for GitLab.com's horizontal scalability through its Cells architecture. This role involves building and maintaining critical edge routing services and the Topology Service, ensuring reliable and low-latency traffic direction and robust management of cluster topology information.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement edge traffic routing that transparently directs requests to the correct Cell for users.
• Build and evolve the Topology Service, acting as the authoritative source of cluster state for routing, resource assignment, and Cell lifecycle decisions.
• Collaborate with feature teams across the product to make features and data models Cell-aware within the GitLab Rails monolith and supporting services.
• Operate and improve routing and topology systems by participating in tier-2 on-call, responding to escalated incidents, and enhancing observability and operational tooling.
• Author Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), operational runbooks, and documentation to facilitate understanding, adoption, and extension of the Cells platform by other teams.
• Review merge requests from GitLab team members and community contributors, upholding high standards for correctness, performance, and security.

Requirements

• Experience building observable, resilient production services using Golang or Ruby on Rails.
• Proven background in delivering and operating production systems in high-scale environments, including incident response and operational ownership.
• Ability to reason effectively about distributed systems, covering consistency models, partitioning strategies, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with working in large, multi-team codebases and coordinating changes across teams and services, including making features and data models Cell-aware.
• Knowledge of observability practices such as metrics, tracing, and alerting, with a focus on building systems operable on-call.
• Strong written communication skills essential for an async-first, globally distributed team, including documenting decisions (e.g., architecture decision records) and runbooks.
• Experience with relational databases in production, including schema design, migrations, and query performance tuning.

Nice to Have

• TypeScript experience.
• Experience building high-throughput networking services (gRPC and protocol buffers knowledge is a plus).
• PostgreSQL experience.

About Company

We are the Cells Infrastructure team within the Tenant Scale group in Infrastructure Platforms at GitLab. We are a globally distributed, all-remote group of Backend Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers working asynchronously across multiple time zones. Our team is responsible for foundational services within GitLab’s Cells architecture, including edge routing and topology systems that maintain cluster state. Our mission is to scale GitLab.com horizontally, ensuring reliability, low-latency performance, and operational efficiency as we grow safely.

How to Apply

Apply directly through the provided job link.