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

GitLab's Cells Infrastructure team is part of the Tenant Scale group within Infrastructure Platforms. This globally distributed, all-remote team of Backend Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers works asynchronously across multiple time zones. They are responsible for foundational services of GitLab's Cells architecture, including edge routing and topology systems, which provide the source of truth for cluster state. Their core mission is to enable GitLab.com to scale horizontally reliably, with low latency, and operatively, ensuring every request reaches the correct cluster as the platform continues to grow safely.

Introduction

As a Senior Backend Engineer, Cells Infrastructure, you will be instrumental in building the foundation for GitLab.com's horizontal scaling through its Cells architecture. This role focuses on developing edge routing services to direct traffic across independent Cell clusters and the Topology Service, which manages and serves cluster topology information as the definitive source of truth for the platform. Your contributions will ensure reliable, low-latency routing across protocols and empower GitLab teams to confidently build Cell-aware features as the platform grows.

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 across the GitLab Rails monolith and supporting services to integrate Cell-aware features and data models with product teams.
• Operate and enhance the routing and topology systems through tier-2 on-call participation, incident response, and improvements to 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 about distributed systems, including consistency models, partitioning strategies, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience building high-throughput networking services.
• Familiarity 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 that are confident to operate on-call.
• Strong written communication skills for an async-first, globally distributed team, including documenting decisions (e.g., architecture decision records) and runbooks.
• Experience working with relational databases in production, including schema design, migrations, and query performance tuning.

Nice to Have

• TypeScript experience.
• gRPC and protocol buffers knowledge.
• PostgreSQL experience.

About Company

GitLab's Cells Infrastructure team is part of the Tenant Scale group within Infrastructure Platforms. This globally distributed, all-remote team of Backend Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers works asynchronously across multiple time zones. They are responsible for foundational services of GitLab's Cells architecture, including edge routing and topology systems, which provide the source of truth for cluster state. Their core mission is to enable GitLab.com to scale horizontally reliably, with low latency, and operatively, ensuring every request reaches the correct cluster as the platform continues to grow safely.

How to Apply

Apply directly through the provided job link.