GitLab
Senior Backend Engineer, Database Excellence (Ruby)
Remote role where the employee must remain based in a particular country.
United Kingdom only
Employer listed it 9 days ago · Added 5 days ago
First listed 9 days ago and still open.
Salary
Not stated
Location
United Kingdom only
Work style
Async
Contract
Full-time
Experience
Senior
Category
Data
This employer didn't state pay. Jobs like this usually pay around $145k–$210k a year, a typical range taken from 255 senior-level data roles on Nomaders that do state pay. It's a guide, not an offer.
Remote flexibility
Work from home
This is a remote role, but the employee must be based in United Kingdom. It is work from home rather than work from anywhere.
What the employer says
- Source listing states candidate location: "Remote, United Kingdom"
What Nomaders makes of it
- Residency required in United Kingdom
- Payroll and tax are likely handled in that country only
The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.
About the 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.
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.
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.
Requirements
- ·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.
Benefits
- ·Flexible Paid Time Off
- ·Team Member Resource Groups
- ·Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- ·Growth and Development Fund
How to apply
- 1Check the flexibility label above, work from home, matches where you plan to live and work.
- 2Tailor your CV to the role at GitLab, mentioning your remote working experience and working hours (Async).
- 3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.
Found 5d ago. Last checked 23 Sept. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.
Listing sourced from Company boards.
Similar roles
Other open data roles with comparable remote rules.
Free to apply, no account needed.
Typically $145k to $210k per year · You'll be taken to the employer's careers page.