Intermediate Backend Engineer, Authorization
GitLab · Posted Nov 3
DevSecOps platform, software version control, CI/CD pipeline, and AI-assisted development services
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About the role
GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, and its Authorization team builds and maintains the system that decides what every user, token, and automated agent can access on GitLab.com, Self-Managed, and Dedicated. The stack today is a Ruby on Rails monolith with roughly 400 policy classes and about 1,900 permissions enforcing GraphQL and REST API requests, moving toward a new authorization stack that pairs the monolith with a Rust policy engine reachable over gRPC. This role implements authorization changes in the Rails monolith, extends fine-grained token permissions and custom roles, and makes incremental refactors while preserving existing customer behavior.
What you will do
- Implement authorization changes in GitLab's Ruby on Rails monolith so permission checks allow intended access and deny unauthorized access.
- Deliver well-scoped workstreams from feature-flagged rollout through verifying that the old and new systems produce the same results, with review and guidance from senior engineers.
- Build and extend fine-grained permissions for tokens and roles so additional resources have permission coverage consistent with the established catalog.
- Extend and fix authorization enforcement so GraphQL and the REST API enforce the intended permissions consistently.
- Make incremental refactors to long-lived policy code without changing behavior for existing customers.
- Investigate and fix reliability, performance, and security issues so affected permission checks return the expected results without regressions.
- Work with the authentication, platform, and artificial intelligence (AI) teams to document interface contracts that keep permission checks consistent as authorization moves toward a shared service.
- Contribute to design documents, merge requests, and code reviews so proposed changes have a documented rationale and review feedback is addressed asynchronously.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Solid experience building and maintaining production Ruby on Rails applications, typically gained over 2 to 4 years or more.
- Hands-on experience with authorization concepts, such as role-based access control or fine-grained permissions, from work or projects.
- A security mindset: you treat a permission bug as a security bug and consider who a change could affect before choosing an implementation.
- Experience making careful changes to existing codebases, including incremental refactors and feature-flagged rollouts that preserve existing behavior.
- Familiarity with GraphQL or API authorization patterns.
- Awareness of performance, including how repeated permission checks can add up on every request.
- Strong written communication and the ability to work effectively when most decisions happen in a document or merge request rather than a meeting.
- Helpful, but not required: hands-on PostgreSQL experience, or experience with Rust, gRPC or Protocol Buffers, Cedar or other policy languages, Zanzibar-style authorization systems, Go, or service-oriented architecture.
Benefits and support
- Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
About GitLab
GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, delivered as a single application that empowers development, security, and operations teams to ship software faster and more securely. Operating as one of the world's largest all-remote companies, GitLab integrates the entire software lifecycle from planning and source code management to CI/CD and automated security testing. Millions of users and thousands of organizations globally rely on GitLab to scale their development workflows and adopt agentic AI engineering.
- Industry
- Software Development
- Company size
- 2375 employees
- Founded
- 2011
- Location
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Funding
Public Company · $435M raised
- 2022-09-16Post IPOUndisclosed
- 2019-09-17Series E$268M
- 2018-09-19Series D$100M
- 2017-10-10Series C$20M
- 2016-03-15Series B$4M
Leadership
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Chief Technology Officer
Chief Product and Marketing Officer
Chief Business and Legal Officer
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