Senior Backend Engineer

An overview of this role

GitLab is an open core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, and more than 100,000 organizations use it. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. We make this possible by running our operations on our product and staying aligned with our values.

The AI Events team builds the event platform and trigger system that power GitLab Duo Flows, enabling them to run automatically in response to events across the development lifecycle. The platform handles internal GitLab events like code pushes, issue and merge request changes, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline results, and deployments, as well as custom events from third-party tools like Jira, Jenkins, and Slack. Flow Triggers link projects to flows, firing automatically when matching events occur, so that AI-powered workflows like automated code review can run without anyone lifting a finger.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll join a small, close-knit team that maintains infrastructure that many of GitLab's AI features rely on. You'll likely spend much of your time on the triggers side of the platform, linking events across GitLab and third-party tools to the AI workflows that act on them. This part of the system needs to handle significant scale and stay highly available, since it's core to automated AI-enabled work across the platform.

What you’ll do

• Design and build the trigger system that links GitLab events, including code pushes, merge request and issue changes, CI/CD results, and deployments, and third-party events from tools like Jira, Jenkins, and Slack to the AI-powered Duo Flows that act on them.
• Contribute to the broader event platform, the core infrastructure that many of GitLab's AI features rely on to know when and how to run.
• Architect for high availability and throughput, since this part of the system sits at the center of automated AI workflows across GitLab and needs to reliably process events at scale.
• Work within GitLab's Rails monolith, where much of the event and trigger system lives, while staying open to other languages used elsewhere in the platform.
• Influence product and architecture direction by proposing iterative solutions to complex technical problems across a multi-service environment.
• Collaborate closely with your teammates, product manager, and designer to shape what the trigger system supports next, likely starting with an additional trigger type.
• Partner cross-departmentally with other Duo Agent Platform teams to make sure triggers and events integrate cleanly with the broader agent ecosystem GitLab is building.
• Participate in Tier 2 and Tier 3 on-call rotations to troubleshoot production, security, and urgent engineering issues in a globally distributed environment.

What you’ll bring

• Deep experience with Ruby and Rails, comfortable working within a large, established monolith and shipping production code effectively.
• Proven track record building products that interact with large language models, not training or building machine learning models yourself, but with hands-on experience integrating large language models into real, user-facing tools.
• Proven track record designing and operating systems built for large scale, with a focus on high availability and throughput in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with agentic systems and development, including building workflows that let AI agents take autonomous action.
• Demonstrated ability to make progress in evolving problem spaces and learn new AI capabilities quickly as the underlying technology shifts fast and this team ships while it learns.
• Strong written communication skills for working asynchronously in a remote, globally distributed team.
• Additional helpful experience includes Python, since other parts of GitLab's AI platform are built in it, and using GitLab as a product.

About the team

We're part of GitLab's AI Engineering organization. We're a small team with members based in Europe, and we're growing. We work closely with our manager, product manager, and designer, and we coordinate cross-departmentally with other AI Engineering teams, since GitLab's AI teams work closely together.

We operate async-first, communicating through GitLab issues and Slack, with async standups and regular one-on-ones. We value autonomy and ownership, giving engineers the authority to make decisions and move quickly, balanced with high context sharing across the group. AI is a top priority at GitLab, and we work on cutting-edge technology in a high-impact, high-visibility part of the company.