Senior Backend Engineer, Platform Readiness

Senior Backend Engineer, Platform ReadinessGitLab 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.GitLab features must ship successfully across four distinct deployment platforms—Self-Managed, Dedicated, Dedicated for Government, and GitLab.com. Today, developers routinely discover platform compatibility issues late in development, triggering costly rework, delays, and emergency escalations. The Platform Readiness team is building an internal developer tooling capability that embeds platform readiness intelligence directly into GitLab's software development lifecycle to solve this problem.As a Senior Backend Engineer on the newly established Platform Readiness team, you'll architect and evolve the systems that enable features to ship successfully across all platforms by automating the evaluation of platform readiness requirements and surfacing risks early. You'll be a technical anchor for the team, driving the evolution of platform readiness from manual, ad-hoc assessments toward intelligent, agentic automation. Your work will directly impact GitLab's ability to ship features faster while dramatically reducing the risk of platform-readiness gaps and the operational burden of cross-platform 'll receive onboarding and technical guidance from other engineers and team leadership as you establish the technical direction for the Platform Readiness team.What You'll DoContribute to the Platform Readiness team's agentic workflows on the Duo Agent Platform: design, implement, and evolve the Core Agentic Workflow (currently published to the AI Catalog as a DAP flow) and the Requirements Agent, enabling automated evaluation of platform readiness assessments against platform requirementsEvolve the platform requirements knowledge base: contribute to schema design, validation tooling, and CI systems that power the agentic workflow; ensure the schema captures the full scope of platform readiness concerns across all four platforms and domainsBuild integration surfaces that enable feature teams to engage the Platform Readiness team where they already work: issues, merge requests, design documents, and CI/CD pipelinesPartner with platform teams (Infrastructure, Security, Data) to translate their expertise into structured platform requirements, domain skills, and validation logic without requiring specific domain knowledgeContribute to the quality control feedback loop: design systems that surface assessment errors, missed gaps, and content drift back to the governance loop for continuous improvement; measure and improve assessment accuracy and guidance relevanceMentor other engineers on the team in agentic-workflow standards, prompt discipline, evaluation methodology, and the principles of human-AI collaboration in platform readinessContribute to technical documentation and architectural decision records that document the Platform Readiness team's technical evolution and rationale for key design choicesWhat You'll BringRequired Experience & Skills5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2+ years in backend, platform, or developer-facing toolingStrong proficiency in TypeScript/Node, Python, or Golang (Ruby a plus)Experience shipping developer-facing tooling where the primary user is another engineerUnderstanding of GitLab-style development workflows (issues, epics, merge requests, CI/CD, code review) as first-class artifacts that automation can read and reason aboutAbility to work in cross-functional environments across multiple platform teamsExperience with structured content systems, schemas, or validation toolingHighly Valued ExperienceExperience with AI/agentic systems (DAP, ADK, LangGraph, or similar) OR demonstrated ability to reason rigorously about the boundary between what AI should decide and what humans must ownExperience integrating with LLM APIs and reasoning about cost, latency, evaluation, and failure modesBackground in developer experience or platform engineeringExperience with governance patterns for shared standards and cross-org decision-makingOpen source contribution history in platform, developer experience, or AI infrastructurePostgreSQL or other relational database experience at scaleWhat Makes You Stand Out (Strong Plus)You've shipped agentic workflows in production and dealt with the operational complexities of AI-driven automationYou have experience designing schema-driven content systems with non-engineer authors and evolving them as requirements changeYou've built developer platform teams at scale and understand the dynamics of enabling other engineersYou have observability and monitoring experience for AI systems, including evaluation metrics, cost tracking, and failure analysisYou can explain complex concepts (agentic workflows, platform readiness, governance) clearly to platform teams, feature teams, product managers, and executivesAbout the TeamThe Platform Readiness team is part of GitLab Developer Experience, building internal developer tooling capability for platform readiness across GitLab's four deployment targets: Self-Managed, Dedicated, Dedicated for Government, and GitLab.com. We partner with platform teams, feature teams, and product management to ensure every feature is evaluated against platform readiness requirements before it ships.Current challenges we're tackling:Moving from manual coordination to embedded automation: Transitioning from manual, ad-hoc platform readiness assessments to automated, agentic evaluation while maintaining human oversight and trustBuilding a structured, machine-readable requirements body: Evolving the platform requirements schema to capture the full scope of platform readiness concerns across all domains and platformsMaking platform readiness native to the tools feature teams already use: Enabling platform teams to contribute domain expertise and validation logic without requiring deep Platform Readiness infrastructure knowledgeBuilding the measurement systems to know we're working: Creating observability and evaluation frameworks that give us confidence in agentic-workflow decisions and surface failures earlyTeam structure:You'll be joining a newly established Platform Readiness team that is building the capability to embed platform readiness intelligence into the development lifecycle. As a Senior engineer, you'll work closely with team leadership to define technical direction while mentoring other engineers on the team. You'll receive onboarding and technical guidance from other engineers and team leadership on the Platform Readiness team's architecture and agentic-workflow GitLab Supports Full-Time EmployeesBenefits to support your health, finances, and well-beingFlexible Paid Time OffTeam Member Resource GroupsEquity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase PlanGrowth and Development FundParental LeavePlease 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 Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab's policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital