Staff Backend Engineer (AI)

An overview of this role:

• As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll help shape and scale the infrastructure behind GitLab CI.
• You'll play a central role in how we integrate AI into CI/CD workflows.
• Your work will impact performance, reliability, and usability for people running millions of CI jobs.

What you’ll do:

• Shape and scale GitLab CI backend infrastructure to improve performance, reliability, and usability.
• Design and implement AI-powered features for Agentic CI, including agents, agentic flows, and LLM-backed tooling that integrates with GitLab's Duo Agent Platform.
• Define what success looks like for AI in CI before you build, including baselines, measurable outcomes, and clear signals that help the team learn and iterate.

What you’ll bring:

• Advanced proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, with experience building and maintaining reliable backend services in a large codebase.
• Hands-on experience building, running, and debugging high-traffic production systems, ideally in CI, workflow orchestration, or adjacent infrastructure-heavy domains.
• A data-driven approach to engineering: defining hypotheses, establishing baseline metrics, instrumenting changes, and measuring outcomes against clear success criteria.