Backend Engineer / Senior Backend Engineer, Switchboard

Backend Engineers in Infrastructure, will work alongside SREs, and are experienced Ruby developers who work in the product with a focus on reliability, observability, performance and scalability at the application level, as well as on resource optimization from an Infrastructure perspective and on operationally relevant features.

As part of the Switchboard team, Backend Engineers specialization will focus primarily on building the customer portal  and the corresponding backend control plane to operate a large number of GitLab environments, through automating all workflows - from provisioning new environments to daily operating tasks. This is the main difference between other Backend Engineer roles in Infrastructure, as your day to day will be occupied by automation tasks of a large number of GitLab environments (and the environments used by GitLab), and programming tasks across many environments.

You may be a fit to this role if you:

• Have strong programming skills as a backend engineer with Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails. 
• Strong experience with profiling and metrics analysis
• Strong experience with observability tools, including metrics (Prometheus is a plus), structured logging and distributed tracing
• A background in DevOps, exposure to Linux, GCP/AWS, Ansible, Terraform or similar products is desirable
• Good knowledge around SQL and/or PostgreSQL
• Have experience regularly interacting with customers, and a focus on resolving their requests with a sense of urgency.
• Are able to leverage GitLab as your day to day go-to tool
• Are able to reason about large systems - how they work and can be operated on a large scale, edge cases, failure modes, behaviors
• Have experience in collaborating and communicating asynchronously
• Have an urge to document all the things so you don't need to learn the same thing twice
• Have an enthusiastic, go-for-it attitude. When you see something broken, you can't help but fix it
• Have a strong sense for action and know how to iterate through a problem quickly
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values

Bonus points if you:

• A background in working with the Kubernetes APIs
• You've built high scale systems with Kafka, Zookeeper, or similar messaging queues.
• You’ve built high scale APIs to orchestrate distributed systems
• You have worked on complex implementations featuring multi-threading, async IO, advanced scheduling and resource management

Projects you could work on:

• Build fault-tolerant, horizontally scalable solution to enable customers to operate their  GitLab environments
• Work on the GitLab core projects such as, GitLab Rails, GitLab Workhorse, Gitaly, etc.
• Work on projects that create deployment packages of GitLab such as, GitLab Helm Chart, omnibus-gitlab, etc.
• Work on the GitLab observability stack (e.g. ELK, Prometheus)
• Interact with various cloud provider systems (e.g. GCP, AWS)

You share our values, and work in accordance with those values.