Intermediate Backend Engineer, Runner Core at GitLab

About the role

Intermediate Backend Engineer designing and developing secure features for GitLab Runner. Collaborating with cross-functional teams and engaging with the open-source community in a remote work environment.

Design and develop features and improvements for GitLab Runner that are secure, well-tested, and high-performance, with a focus on strong architecture in Go services, appropriate for an intermediate-level engineer.
Partner with the Product Manager and other Senior Engineers to assess the technical feasibility and scope of Runner-related feature requests, contributing your perspective and asking clarifying questions.
Contribute to architectural decisions that modernize Runner's technology stack, favoring solutions that address root causes over fixes that treat symptoms.
Take end-to-end ownership of your features from design through implementation, code review, deployment, monitoring, and iterative refinement.
Collaborate closely with other engineers on the team and within the Runner Organization through code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing, both learning from others and helping raise the overall technical bar.
Work with cross-functional partners, including Support and Product, to help diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve customer issues related to GitLab Runner and CI Functions, and feed those learnings back into the product.
Engage with GitLab Runner's vibrant open-source community by triaging bug reports, reviewing community-contributed merge requests, and helping contributors succeed.
Participate in team rotations including bug triage, community contribution reviews, and support escalation response.

Proficiency in developing backend services in Go and applying Go best practices in production, whether gained through professional work, open-source contributions, or other hands-on experience.
Ability to design and build scalable, distributed, and resilient systems that can grow with increasing demand, ideally with exposure to high-throughput CI pipelines, job orchestration, or similar infrastructure.
Hands-on skills with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, including deploying and operating services that run CI workloads across diverse environments.
Ability to analyze, profile, and optimize performance in distributed systems using appropriate tools and observability data, especially for latency-sensitive and resource-intensive CI execution paths.
Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure (for example, a major cloud provider or infrastructure-as-code tools) and concepts related to site reliability and operating SaaS platforms that run large-scale CI.
Comfort with asynchronous communication and proactive written updates, essential for collaborating effectively across a globally distributed team.
Strong collaboration skills, including working closely with other engineers, contributing to shared technical practices, participating in code reviews, and communicating clearly with cross-functional partners like Product and Support.