Backend Engineer, Enablement: Pods group

This position is 100% remote based.

At GitLab, developers are independent and self-organized individual contributors who work together as a tight team in a remote and agile way.

The Pods Group is focused on a long-term horizontal scaling solution for GitLab. There are multiple proposals and ideas to increase horizontal scalability via solutions such as database sharding and tenant isolation. The charter of this group is to explore, iterate on, validate, and lead implementation of proposals to provide a solution to accommodate Gitlab.com's daily-active user growth. Hopefully this is the type of work that gets you excited about joining the team, if so please read on!

Backend Engineers at GitLab work on our product. This includes both the open source version of GitLab, the enterprise editions, and the GitLab.com service as well. The efforts led by the Pods Group will have an impact across all of GitLab. You will be part of a group that is changing functionality used by all features in GitLab (e.g. Load Balancing) or consulting with development groups and sub-departments to implement changes required to support Decomposition.

The Work

The Pods Group is a part of the Enablement sub-department. Enablement, as the name suggests, is about enabling development efficiencies for our greater development community and improving our scalability story for GitLab.com. We have some lofty goals on what we’d like to achieve in the next year. We cannot do all of the work we have identified by ourselves, so we are creating tools to enable teams to implement scalable solutions. Below is a list of a few of these initiatives:

• Decompose GitLab's database to improve scalability
• Support for many databases
• Rollout decomposed CI Database on GitLab.com

What you will do

• Develop new features in collaboration with our product management, UX, and frontend teams.
• Keep changes small and iterate towards the best solution.
• Reviewing Rails and/or database related changes submitted by other engineers or community contributors
• Documenting best practices or patterns to avoid
• Developing tooling to proactively inform developers of potential performance issues
• Research, design and implement solutions to improve product performance 

What you will bring

• Significant experience with Ruby on Rails in a production environment
• Professional software engineering experience with Databases (preferably PostgreSQL) in large production environments
• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
• You can reason about software, algorithms, and performance from a high level
• You are passionate about open source.
• Strong written communication skills.
• Self-motivated and have strong organizational skills.
• You share our values, and work in accordance with those values.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in a peak performance organization, preferably a tech startup
• Experience with the GitLab product as a user or contributor
• Product company experience
• Experience working with a remote team
• Developer platform/tool industry experience
• Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team
• Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools

Also, we know it’s tough, but please try to avoid the ​​confidence gap​.​​ You don’t have to match all the listed requirements exactly to be considered for this role.

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