Senior Backend Engineer, Platform Readiness

About this role

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.

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 and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

*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.

GitLab features must ship successfully across four distinct deployment platforms—Self-Managed, Dedicated, Dedicated for Government, and GitLab.com. Today, developers routinely discover platform compatibility issues late in development, triggering costly rework, delays, and emergency escalations. The Platform Readiness team is building an internal developer tooling capability that embeds platform readiness intelligence directly into GitLab's software development lifecycle to solve this problem.

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the newly established Platform Readiness team, you'll architect and evolve the systems that enable features to ship successfully across all platforms by automating the evaluation of platform readiness requirements and surfacing risks early. You'll be a technical anchor for the team, driving the evolution of platform readiness from manual, ad-hoc assessments toward intelligent, agentic automation. Your work will directly impact GitLab's ability to ship features faster while dramatically reducing the risk of platform-readiness gaps and the operational burden of cross-platform validation.

You'll receive onboarding and technical guidance from other engineers and team leadership as you establish the technical direction for the Platform Readiness team.

What you'll do

Contribute to the Platform Readiness team's agentic workflows on the Duo Agent Platform: design, implement, and evolve the Core Agentic Workflow (currently published to the AI Catalog as a DAP flow) and the Requirements Agent, enabling automated evaluation of platform readiness assessments against platform requirements

Evolve the platform requirements knowledge base: contribute to schema design, validation tooling, and CI systems that power the agentic workflow; ensure the schema captures the full scope of platform readiness concerns across all four platforms and domains

Build integration surfaces that enable feature teams to engage the Platform Readiness team where they already work: issues, merge requests, design documents, and CI/CD pipelines

Partner with platform teams (Infrastructure, Security, Data) to translate their expertise into structured platform requirements, domain skills, and validation logic without requiring specific domain knowledge

Contribute to the quality control feedback loop: design systems that surface assessment errors, missed gaps, and content drift back to the governance loop for continuous improvement; measure and improve assessment accuracy and guidance relevance

Mentor other engineers on the team in agentic-workflow standards, prompt discipline, evaluation methodology, and the principles of human-AI collaboration in platform readiness

Contribute to technical documentation and architectural decision records that document the Platform Readiness team's technical evolution and rationale for key design choices

What you'll bring

Required Experience & Skills

5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2+ years in backend, platform, or developer-facing tooling

Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node, Python, or Golang (Ruby a plus)

Experience shipping developer-facing tooling where the primary user is another engineer

Understanding of GitLab-style development workflows (issues, epics, merge requests, CI/CD, code review) as first-class artifacts that automation can read and reason about

Ability to work in cross-functional environments across multiple platform teams

Experience with structured content systems, schemas, or validation tooling

Highly Valued Experience

Experience with AI/agentic systems (DAP, ADK, LangGraph, or similar) OR demonstrated ability to reason rigorously about the boundary between what AI should decide and what humans must own

Experience integrating with LLM APIs and reasoning about cost, latency, evaluation, and failure modes

Background in developer experience or platform engineering

Experience with governance patterns for shared standards and cross-org decision-making

Open source contribution history in platform, developer experience, or AI infrastructure

PostgreSQL or other relational database experience at scale

What Makes You Stand Out (Strong Plus)

You've shipped agentic workflows in production and dealt with the operational complexities of AI-driven automation

You have experience designing schema-driven content systems with non-engineer authors and evolving them as requirements change

You've built developer platform teams at scale and understand the dynamics of enabling other engineers

You have observability and monitoring experience for AI systems, including evaluation metrics, cost…