Senior Backend Engineer - Platform Insights

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer in Platform Insights, you'll build and evolve the core backend systems that power GitLab's data platform.

In this role, you'll focus primarily on Go-based development for the Data Insights Platform and Siphon, with an emphasis on core system design, production readiness, and deployment across GitLab environments.

You'll own high-throughput, multi-component backend systems and help shape architecture, reliability, deployment, and operational maturity across GitLab's SaaS, Dedicated, and Self-Managed environments.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and evolve backend services in Go for the Data Insights Platform and Siphon, with a focus on scalable ingestion, transport, replication, storage, querying, and deployment paths.
• Own significant parts of the backend architecture for Data Insights Platform, Siphon, and the Query API, including the gRPC integration between the Query API and the GitLab Rails application, and shape technical direction for system boundaries, reliability, throughput, operability, and maintainability.
• Contribute to systems built around replication, buffering, query-serving, and query-oriented storage patterns, including Siphon, NATS or similar messaging layers, ClickHouse-backed storage, and APIs consumed by GitLab product surfaces.
• Drive production readiness and deployment of Data Insights Platform and Siphon across GitLab environments, with attention to rollout safety, environment-specific constraints, and long-term operational readiness.
• Debug and improve complex distributed systems in production, including performance bottlenecks, scaling limits, failure recovery paths, and observability gaps.
• Work closely with Infrastructure, Data, and peer Engineering teams on technical design, iteration planning, code review, and delivery to keep the platform reliable, secure, and usable by downstream consumers.
• Work asynchronously with other team members in GitLab's all-remote environment and contribute to a culture of clear written communication, iteration, and ownership.
• Use AI effectively in your daily workflow as a productivity multiplier for implementation, debugging, investigation, and documentation work.

What you'll bring

• Strong backend engineering experience in Go, including building and operating production services.
• Experience designing scalable, reliable systems for high-throughput or data-intensive workloads.
• Experience building and evolving APIs and service integrations, including gRPC or similar patterns between backend services and application layers.
• Experience working on data platforms, data systems, event pipelines, or other foundational infrastructure.
• Experience with ClickHouse or similar query-focused data stores used for query-heavy workloads.
• Working knowledge of Ruby on Rails, or a clear willingness and ability to ramp up quickly.
• Experience with infrastructure concerns such as reliability, observability, performance, and deployment across production environments.
• Experience working across team boundaries to deliver platform capabilities used by other product and engineering teams.

About the team

You'll join the Foundations team, where we build the core of GitLab's data platform and where you'll focus specifically on Data Insights Platform, Siphon, and the Query API.

Our core platform provides the foundational infrastructure for key products and capabilities such as GitLab Orbit.