Senior Backend Engineer, Deployment Environments

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software. * Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab. An overview of this role As a Senior Backend Engineer in GitLab’s Platform Enablement organization, you will help make GitLab easier to deploy, validate, and operate across environments. This team is centered on two major areas: Cloud Native deployment guidance and ephemeral environments. You’ll help shape GitLab’s next generation of self-managed deployment guidance as Reference Architectures evolve toward a model based on deployment patterns, workload characterization, component requirements, topology guidance, and scaling principles. You’ll also help improve production-like ephemeral environments so teams can validate changes earlier, test against infrastructure and deployment conditions that more closely reflect real-world operation, and reduce drift between development, CI, and production. This includes shaping the tooling, workflows, and platform contracts that make these environments more consistent, more repeatable, and more useful to engineers building and shipping across GitLab’s different deployment models. Current projects Deployment Environments is currently focused on: • Evolving GitLab’s self-managed deployment guidance beyond legacy Reference Architectures into a clear Cloud Native model. • Improving production-like ephemeral environments for earlier, higher-confidence validation. • Supporting a platform model where services declare requirements, operators satisfy them, and shared artifacts work across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed. What you’ll do In this role, you’ll: • Build tooling and workflows for cloud-native and self-managed deployment environments. • Contribute to Cloud Native deployment guidance, including component requirements, architecture patterns, topology guidance, and scaling principles. • Improve ephemeral environments that bring validation closer to production reality. • Work across application, infrastructure, and platform boundaries to keep deployment artifacts and environment contracts consistent from development through production. • Partner with related teams on packaging, testing, delivery workflows, and customer-facing deployment guidance. What you’ll bring • Strong backend engineering experience, ideally with Kubernetes-based systems, distributed applications, or platform engineering • Experience with deployment architecture, environment management, or cloud-native operations • Comfort working at the boundary of developer workflows and production infrastructure • Good systems thinking around service dependencies, deployment patterns, and infrastructure abstraction. • A collaborative, pragmatic approach to building…