Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), AI Catalog: External Agents

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 on GitLab’s External Agents team, you’ll design and build integrations that bring GitLab agents into tools such as Slack and connect external solutions such as Claude Code or Codex with GitLab. You’ll take end-to-end ownership of complex features, help shape architectural patterns for how GitLab exposes its AI functionality, and collaborate with engineers across the Agent Foundations stage and adjacent AI engineering teams. This is a high-visibility area at the intersection of GitLab’s core platform and AI strategy. What you’ll do • Develop, ship, and maintain secure, well-tested, and performant external agent integrations across the GitLab monolith backend. • Collaborate with Product Management, user experience, frontend, backend, and AI specialists to refine requirements and deliver high-quality improvements iteratively. • Design, implement, and review GraphQL and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and related backend logic, with clear contracts for frontend clients. • Improve and extend automated testing, including RSpec and other frameworks, to strengthen quality, reliability, and developer feedback loops. • Share standards, patterns, and lessons with other engineers to support responsible AI integration and evidence-based engineering across the team. • Participate in Tier 2 on-call rotations , troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve observability and resiliency. • Assess the competitive landscape and help GitLab build strong AI integrations as agentic technology evolves. What you’ll bring • Experience building and maintaining production applications with Ruby on Rails, including background jobs, APIs, and data models. • Comfort working across the stack in a mature codebase. • Proficiency in designing or extending REST or GraphQL APIs with attention to scalability, maintainability, and backward compatibility. • Practical experience designing and shipping AI-powered backend features or integrations. • Strong SQL skills and familiarity with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including efficient queries and data modeling. • Experience identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks at the application and, where relevant, infrastructure layers. • Openness to learning, collaborating in an asynchronous, distributed team, and applying transferable skills from related technologies or domains; familiarity with Python backends or Vue frontends is a plus. About the team External Agents is a functional team within the AI Catalog group . We will initially consist of…