Intermediate Backend Engineer, Cells Infrastructure
GitLab · Posted Oct 15
DevSecOps platform, software version control, CI/CD pipeline, and AI-assisted development services
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About the role
GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, and the Cells Infrastructure team is part of GitLab's Scale & Architecture organization, which builds and operates the core services that let GitLab.com grow. The team works on splitting GitLab.com into independent cells, each with its own application and data stack behind a shared routing layer. This role builds the Go-based Cells control plane, the TypeScript/Cloudflare Workers global routing layer, and Rails application changes that keep data unique and consistent across cells, using Go, Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, gRPC, Cloud Spanner, and OpenTelemetry.
What you will do
- Design, build, and maintain the Cells control plane, a Go service using gRPC (remote procedure calls) and backed by Cloud Spanner that tracks cells, organizations, and globally unique resources.
- Extend the global routing layer, written in TypeScript on Cloudflare Workers, so requests reach the right cell. This includes classifying requests by path, namespace, and token, and supporting more protocols and services.
- Make changes in the GitLab Rails application so it works across multiple cells: claiming globally unique resources, propagating organization context, and keeping cell-local data consistent.
- Design application programming interfaces (APIs) and data models with correctness, idempotency, and backward compatibility in mind, so changes can roll out safely across a fleet of cells.
- Write thorough automated tests, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and improve test coverage and reliability across the services we own.
- Instrument your services with OpenTelemetry for metrics, logs, and distributed tracing. Help define service level objectives (SLOs) and take part in on-call for the services you build.
- Work with product teams to make their features cell-compatible, and review their changes for Cells correctness.
- Write clear design documents, architecture decision records, and documentation, and take part in code review as both author and reviewer.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Professional experience building and running backend services in production, including monitoring, debugging, and incident response. You've instrumented services with OpenTelemetry and used distributed tracing to debug requests across service boundaries.
- Proficiency in Go, or strong experience in another backend language and willingness to work in Go daily.
- Experience with Ruby on Rails and TypeScript, or the willingness to become productive in both. Our control plane is written in Go, the GitLab application in Rails, and our edge routing layer in TypeScript.
- Experience designing APIs using gRPC or Representational State Transfer (REST), and working with relational or distributed databases, including schema design, transactions, and migrations.
- A strong understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, such as consistency, idempotency, concurrency, retries, and failure handling.
- Solid grounding in engineering best practices: test-driven development, small iterative merge requests, thorough code review, feature flags for safe rollouts, and observable, well-documented code.
- Experience working effectively in distributed, all-remote teams: you default to asynchronous, written-first communication, document decisions in issues and merge requests, hand off work cleanly across time zones, and stay transparent about progress and blockers.
- If you've worked with Cloud Spanner, Cloudflare Workers, Kubernetes, multi-tenant or sharded architectures, or contributed to GitLab, that's a plus, not a requirement.
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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