Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), Production Engineering:Tenant Controls

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Remote from: Poland
Salary: PLN 272k–408k / yr
Department: Software Engineering
Employment: Full Time
Experience: Senior
Published: 1 Nov 2026
Apply before: 1 Dec 2026
Listing views: 29
Application actions: 1

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AI Summary

The role, at a glance.

GitLab is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to build and evolve Tenant Controls, a production-engineering framework for application-level rate limiting on GitLab.com. The engineer will design complex backend capabilities, make architectural decisions across modular-monolith and service boundaries, and improve reliability, performance, security, and operational readiness. The role includes incident response, technical mentorship, asynchronous collaboration with product and infrastructure partners, and ownership of engineering standards. Candidates should bring strong backend architecture, API, data-system, and performance-tuning experience, along with practical experience operating reliable agentic AI systems in production.

Role DNA

A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.

Job Complexity

5/5

EasyHard

Pace & Pressure

4/5

RelaxedFast-paced

Autonomy Level

5/5

GuidedFull ownership

Communication Load

5/5

IndependentCollaborative

AI insightThis is a senior, high-scope production engineering position involving platform-scale reliability, rate limiting, architectural trade-offs, and incident response. Success requires independent technical leadership and the ability to influence cross-functional decisions in an asynchronous environment.

Salary analysis

Estimated compensation compared with the broader PLN market for similar roles.

Estimated job median (per year)Market rate

PLN340,000

PLN market range (per year)PLN280k–PLN430k

0PLN473.00k

AI insightThe yearly pay period is inferred from the job context; it was not explicitly stated by the employer. The employer discloses a Poland base-salary range of PLN 272,000–408,000. The posting does not explicitly state a pay cadence, but yearly pay is inferred from the senior full-time role, the use of “base salary range,” and the magnitude of the PLN amounts. The estimated midpoint is PLN 340,000 per year; the estimated Poland market range for a comparable senior backend/production engineering role is PLN 280,000–430,000 per year.

Core skills

Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.

Ruby Backend architecture API design Distributed systems Rate limiting Performance tuning Reliability engineering Incident response PostgreSQL Kubernetes System design Code review Asynchronous communication Agentic AI systems Security engineering

Sample interview questions

How would you design an application-level rate-limiting framework that can be configured and observed without a deployment?

I would separate policy definition, runtime enforcement, counters, and observability into clear interfaces. Policies should be centrally stored, versioned, validated, and safely propagated to application nodes, while enforcement uses a scalable counter store with predictable failure behavior. I would expose metrics, structured events, and operator-facing views for limit decisions, and roll out changes through audited, reversible controls.

Describe how you would decide between extending a modular monolith and creating an independently operated service.

I would assess domain boundaries, ownership, scaling characteristics, data consistency needs, operational cost, and deployment independence. If the capability shares transactional workflows and evolves closely with existing application code, a well-bounded monolith module is often preferable. I would choose a service only when independent scaling, reliability isolation, ownership, or integration requirements clearly justify the additional operational complexity.

How do you investigate a backend performance regression affecting a high-traffic production workflow?

I first establish impact, scope, and recent changes using dashboards, traces, logs, and error rates. I then compare latency and resource profiles across healthy and affected paths, inspect database queries and contention, and reproduce or isolate the issue with representative traffic where possible. I mitigate customer impact quickly through rollback, configuration changes, or traffic controls, then document the root cause and add prevention measures such as tests, alerts, or capacity safeguards.

What practices do you use to make API and schema changes safe for consumers?

I use backward-compatible, additive changes first, version contracts where needed, and ensure producers and consumers can coexist during rollout. For schema changes, I separate migrations from application behavior changes, use safe backfills, monitor error and performance signals, and remove deprecated paths only after adoption is verified. Clear documentation and explicit ownership are essential for cross-team changes.

How would you evaluate whether an agentic AI workflow is safe and useful in production engineering?

I would define a narrow task, measurable success criteria, and explicit safety boundaries before deployment. The workflow should have constrained tool permissions, reliable error handling, audit logs, human review for consequential actions, and evaluation against representative incident or operational scenarios. I would monitor quality, latency, failure modes, and operator trust, then expand autonomy only when evidence shows it improves outcomes without increasing unacceptable risk.

Opportunity details

About this 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

At GitLab, our mission is simple: to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world.

As a Senior Backend Engineer on Tenant Controls, you’ll design, implement, and evolve backend capabilities for a global platform that millions use. You’ll solve problems of high scope and complexity, influence technical and product direction, and improve system quality, reliability, and performance beyond assigned feature work. Working across product, frontend, infrastructure, data, and security, you’ll make pragmatic architectural trade-offs and partner with product managers and designers to deliver value to users in a remote-first, asynchronous environment.

What you’ll do

Design and ship moderate to complex backend features with minimal guidance, choosing between modular-monolith code, shared components, and independently operated services.
Influence team objectives, technical direction, and long-range goals, partnering with product managers and designers to shape requirements around user needs.
Define backend standards for style, maintainability, testing, application programming interfaces (APIs), and operational readiness, advocating for quality, security, availability, and performance.
Mentor associate and intermediate engineers, remove technical blockers, and improve delivery practices through code and design reviews.
Diagnose and prevent performance and reliability issues at scale, participate in incident response, and act as a technical owner where appropriate.
Experiment with and integrate agentic AI into production engineering workflows, evaluate its effectiveness, and coach others on responsible use and sound judgment.

What you’ll bring

Strong command of backend architecture, APIs, data systems, and performance tuning in a complex product or service environment.
Proficiency in modern backend languages and a deep understanding of systems programming, with the ability to learn and adapt rather than mastery of a single language.
Experience designing or evolving modular backend boundaries, bounded contexts, and migration-safe architectures.
Ability to lead through influence, technical judgment, and clear asynchronous written communication, connecting product needs with technical decisions and directing your own work.
Experience building or operating agentic AI systems in production, including loops, tool use, and error-handling strategies that support reliability at scale, beyond prompt engineering alone.
Helpful, but not required: experience with high-throughput distributed systems, concurrency or profiling; containerized production operations (such as Kubernetes); database performance (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, schema evolution or partitioning); large-scale modular monoliths or event-driven systems; public technical communication, open source maintenance or developer-focused software as a service (SaaS).

About the team

You’ll join Tenant Controls within Production Engineering, where we own application-level rate limiting on GitLab.com. We build the framework that defines, counts, and observes every application rate limit and migrate existing implementations onto it. Our mission is to give GitLab.com a single way to define, configure, and observe these limits, so operators can understand them during an incident and change them without a deploy.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the EU, applicable in the specified country or countries only. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location and having regard to any applicable collective agreements. The base salary range does not include bonuses, equity, or benefits.

Poland base salary range: 272,000zł – 408.000zł

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you’re excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

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