Senior Backend Engineer, Database Excellence (Ruby)

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer with the Database Excellence group, you'll build and evolve the data frameworks and tooling that keep GitLab's application datastores scalable, healthy, and safe across both GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed instances. A primary focus for this role is building proactive data growth controls for GitLab.com, including retention and lifecycle management frameworks, enforcement of retention policies at schema-change time, and tooling that keeps database growth sustainable as AI-driven development accelerates how quickly data accumulates. You'll help teams across GitLab reason confidently about data architecture, placement, and lifecycle management, while proactively identifying saturation points in our GitLab.com infrastructure and driving corrective actions with partner teams. With the team's recent move into the Data Engineering organization, you'll also shape new scalability and data health features for self-managed customers, working hands-on with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in a fully remote, highly collaborative environment.

Some examples of our projects:

• Data Growth Controls (retention enforcement and data lifecycle management)
• SQL Traffic Replay Tooling
• Background Operations Framework

What you'll do

• Develop and iterate backend features and data frameworks that make it safe and efficient for GitLab teams to work with data at scale across SaaS and self-managed deployments.
• Design and build data retention and lifecycle management frameworks, including retention policy enforcement, bulk data removal tooling, and automated identification of tables that need retention policies.
• Build shift-left guardrails, such as static analysis checks and schema-change-time enforcement, that catch unsustainable data growth patterns before they reach production.
• Collaborate closely with product management, UX, frontend, infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics teams to design and ship high-performing solutions
• Review and improve database-related changes from other engineers and community contributors, ensuring data integrity, safety, and performance across all deployment scenarios.
• Design, build, and maintain tooling such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks to proactively surface and address scalability and performance issues.
• Research, design, and implement improvements to data retention and lifecycle management, database performance, scalability, and data health, including areas like soft delete strategies and database migration testing.
• Document database best practices, patterns to avoid, and data architecture guidance to enable developers to make informed decisions.
• Develop proactive tooling and guardrails that help developers detect and remediate potential performance and data issues early in the development lifecycle.
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What you'll bring

• Professional software engineering experience working with PostgreSQL in large, complex production environments, including high availability solutions with automatic failover and zero-downtime data migrations as well as managing large or fast-growing datasets through approaches such as data retention, archiving, partitioning, or lifecycle management.
• Proficiency with Ruby on Rails or another Ruby framework, including designing, implementing, and reviewing backend features.
• Ability to reason about software design, algorithms, and performance trade-offs at a system level.
• Strong written communication skills and comfort working asynchronously in an all-remote, distributed team.
• Self-directed work style with effective organizational skills and the ability to manage priorities as a "manager of one".
• Alignment with GitLab's values, including transparency, collaboration, inclusion, and contribution to open source.
• Openness to learning and applying new tools and approaches, including transferable experience from related data, infrastructure, or developer tooling domains.
• Willingness to participate in our tier 2 dabase on-call rotation in your time zone.

The Database Excellence Group is a remote, agile backend team that builds and maintains the frameworks, patterns, and tooling that enable GitLab teams to work confidently with data at scale across all application datastores. As part of the broader Data Engineering organization, we focus on data scalability, health, and developer enablement for both GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed deployments, collaborating closely with infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics stages to ensure data changes are safe, performant, and compatible across diverse environments. We are independent, self-organized contributors, and we collaborate asynchronously across regions. We are currently expanding our mission from proactively identifying and addressing saturation points in GitLab.com infrastructure to also delivering scalability features and data health initiatives to self-managed customers.