Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), Plan: Portfolio Experience

<div class="content-intro"><p>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.</p> <p>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&nbsp;and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZIb5zszQI">Co-create the future with us</a> as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.</p> <p>*<em>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.</em></p></div><h2><strong>An overview of this role</strong></h2> <p>We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for GitLab's<a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/devops/plan/product-planning/"> Portfolio Experience team</a>. You'll be an experienced product engineer who incorporates user needs into feature decisions and brings full stack experience, with a current focus on backend. You'll spend as much time understanding user needs and shaping how features should work as you do building them, working directly with product, users, and open source contributors.</p> <p>You'll help evolve the backend architecture that powers the work items platform, which must serve millions of work items in a single user's view across tens of thousands of groups and projects.</p> <h2><strong>What you’ll do</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Collaborate with product and other engineers to shape requirements, understand user needs, and break complex projects into shippable iterations.</li> <li>Design and implement backend and real-time features in the GitLab monolith, including GraphQL and RESTful APIs and subscriptions, with a focus on performance, reliability, and user impact.</li> <li>Build and evolve portfolio planning capabilities, including work item hierarchy, status rollup, and capacity planning.</li> <li>Improve PostgreSQL performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, partitioning, and moving suitable workloads to Elasticsearch or ClickHouse.</li> <li>Create proofs of concept for complex work, maintain extensive automated test coverage, and support safe rollouts with feature flags and strong observability.</li> <li>Mentor engineers and open source contributors through code reviews, pairing, regular feedback, contributor issues, and hackathons.</li> <li>Participate in on-call rotations, troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve the team's development and review processes.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What you’ll bring</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Experience representing the user perspective while working through trade-offs with product managers, engineers, and users.</li> <li>Experience leading projects involving several engineers over multiple months and supporting others through thoughtful code reviews, feedback, hiring, career development, and mentoring.</li> <li>Full stack experience with a current backend focus, including proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails and an understanding of how complex modern frontends work.</li> <li>Strong PostgreSQL skills and experience improving database performance at scale through query and write optimization, indexing, denormalization, and partitioning.</li> <li>Experience designing and evolving GraphQL and/or RESTful APIs with attention to scalability, backward compatibility, and clear contracts with frontend clients.</li> <li>Experience improving large automated test suites, including the performance and reliability of the tests themselves.</li> <li>Strong written and verbal communication skills for an asynchronous, distributed environment.</li> <li>Experience integrating artificial intelligence into development workflows. Experience building artificial intelligence-powered features or working with Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, or Python is a plus.</li> </ul> <p>We welcome candidates with different backgrounds and transferable skills. If you're excited about this role but don't meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply.</p> <h2><strong>About the team</strong></h2> <p>We are a team of 4 - 2x Backend Engineers, 2x Frontend Engineers located across Europe and Canada. We own the work item hierarchy, including Epic, Issue, and Task relationships, and top-down planning capabilities such as status rollup and capacity planning. We work async-first in two-week iterations, with retrospectives and a weekly sync.</p> <p><br><br></p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p><em>The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the&nbsp;United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US.&nbsp;Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data,&nbsp;and geographic location.&nbsp;The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our <a class="waffle-rich-text-link" href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/benefits/general-and-entity-benefits/" data-sheets-formula-bar-text-link="https://bit.ly/GLBeneUS" data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:12px;color:#1155cc;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;font-family:''Arial'';font-style:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;">benefits</a><span data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:12px;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:'Arial';font-style:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;"> and </span><a class="waffle-rich-text-link" href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/stock-options/" data-sheets-formula-bar-text-link="https://bit.ly/GLequity" data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:12px;color:#1155cc;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;font-family:''Arial'';font-style:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;">equity</a>. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.</em></p></div><div class="title">United States Salary Range</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$139,200</span><span class="divider">&mdash;</span><span>$235,200 USD</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><h4><strong>How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees</strong></h4> <ul> <li><a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/benefits/general-and-entity-benefits/">Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/time-off-and-absence/time-off-types/#flexible-paid-time-off-pto">Flexible Paid Time Off&nbsp;</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-tmag/">Team Member Resource Groups</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/stock-options/">Equity Compensation &amp; Employee Stock Purchase Plan</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/learning-and-develop