Senior Backend Engineer, SSCS: AI Governance

GitLab is developing an AI Governance team within its Secure, Scale, and Compliance area. This team focuses on enhancing AI usage visibility and governance within GitLab for organizations, covering audit events, usage tracking, observability, and policy controls to ensure project protection and compliance. This new team works in parallel with another AI Governance team, addressing a dynamic roadmap. Engineers will collaborate with distributed teams and integrate governance capabilities across the platform, tackling innovative challenges at the intersection of AI, compliance, and large-scale enterprise software.

Introduction

As a Senior Backend Engineer focused on AI Governance at GitLab, you will develop robust backend systems for a paid product designed for regulated enterprises. This product provides critical visibility, policy controls, and compliance evidence for AI usage within the software development lifecycle. This role uniquely blends AI, governance, and enterprise backend engineering, empowering customers to confidently adopt AI agents.

You will contribute across various aspects of AI Governance, including audit event ingestion and export, role-based access control, governance features for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) registry, and storage systems for AI agent artifacts. This position involves solving technical challenges of significant scope and complexity, working closely with the team on architectural design and asynchronous implementation. It is ideal for engineers who enjoy building scalable, reliable enterprise systems in a rapidly evolving domain influenced by emerging AI regulations and customer governance needs.

Responsibilities

• Implement and evolve the AI audit event pipeline, covering ingestion, schema normalization, storage design, partitioning, retention, and export capabilities.
• Develop access control for AI Governance features by integrating permissions for audit logs, policy configuration, and governance dashboards into GitLab's existing authorization model.
• Contribute backend functionality for AI agent artifact features, supporting structured storage and retrieval of agent run metadata alongside existing CI/CD artifacts.
• Build backend services for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) registry, including tool metadata and enforcement controls.
• Design and optimize data models and queries for high-write, event-heavy systems using PostgreSQL and ClickHouse.
• Write and maintain strong RSpec and integration test coverage, and improve team test reliability practices.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and deliver implementations with ownership, collaborating closely with partner teams in AI and Continuous Delivery.

Requirements

• Extensive experience building backend applications with Ruby on Rails in production environments.
• Proficiency in Python and experience building backend services for AI infrastructure, gateways, or related product systems.
• Extensive experience with PostgreSQL and other data-intensive databases like ClickHouse, including schema design, partitioning strategies, and efficient query patterns for event-heavy workloads.
• Experience building REST or GraphQL APIs and designing backend systems for reliable storage, retrieval, and governance workflows.
• Solid understanding of authorization, access control, and enterprise governance concepts in web application architectures.
• Familiarity with regulatory compliance, auditability, or enterprise governance requirements, and the ability to apply them in production systems.
• Clear written communication skills and comfort working effectively in a remote, async-first team.

Nice to Have

• Experience with audit trails, telemetry, event streaming, SIEM integrations, webhook delivery, enterprise retention requirements.
• Experience with AI agent infrastructure, large language models, the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Experience with compliance, observability, and enterprise security products.

About Company

GitLab is developing an AI Governance team within its Secure, Scale, and Compliance area. This team focuses on enhancing AI usage visibility and governance within GitLab for organizations, covering audit events, usage tracking, observability, and policy controls to ensure project protection and compliance. This new team works in parallel with another AI Governance team, addressing a dynamic roadmap. Engineers will collaborate with distributed teams and integrate governance capabilities across the platform, tackling innovative challenges at the intersection of AI, compliance, and large-scale enterprise software.

How to Apply

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