Intermediate Backend Engineer (Ruby), Plan: Project Management

An overview of this role

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer on the Plan: Project Management team, you’ll help shape how thousands of teams plan, track, and deliver work inside GitLab’s Agile Planning offering. You’ll work across feature development, scalability, and performance challenges in a high-scale Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL environment, collaborating closely with frontend and backend engineers, UX designers, and product managers distributed across time zones. You’ll turn product ideas into small, iterative backend changes, design and evolve APIs (REST and GraphQL), maintain high-quality, well-tested code, and improve the reliability and efficiency of a complex platform that many organizations rely on to manage their projects.

Some examples of our projects:

• Evolving GitLab’s project planning workflows so teams can more effectively manage issues, epics, and milestones at scale
• Improving performance and reliability of project management features for large groups and high-traffic instances

What you’ll do

• Collaborate with product managers and UX designers to refine requirements and break down projects into small, iterative backend deliveries.
• Partner with frontend and backend engineers in the Plan Stage to plan, implement, and ship features that improve GitLab’s Agile Planning and project management experience.
• Design, implement, and maintain Ruby on Rails services and REST/GraphQL APIs, ensuring performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Create proof of concepts for complex changes, validate technical approaches, and roll out solutions with extensive automated tests.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested Ruby code that aligns with GitLab’s coding standards for a high-scale web environment.
• Review merge requests from other engineers, provide constructive feedback, and advocate for code quality and long-term maintainability.
• Identify technical debt and efficiency bottlenecks, propose improvements, and implement them as part of the team’s engineering backlog work.
• Support and engage with people not working for GitLab Inc. by preparing issues, reviewing contributions, and participating in initiatives like hackathons.

What you’ll bring

• Professional experience building and maintaining backend services with Ruby on Rails in a production environment
• Experience designing, querying, and optimizing PostgreSQL databases for a complex application or platform
• Experience developing and consuming REST and GraphQL APIs
• Familiarity with distributed, scalable, and reliable systems and the tradeoffs involved in their design
• Ability to write well-tested, maintainable code and to support high code quality through constructive code review
• Comfortable working in a highly agile, iterative development process with a distributed, largely asynchronous team
• Proficiency in written and spoken English and effective communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Self-motivated, organized working style, with openness to learning, collaborating across functions, and applying transferable skills from diverse backgrounds

About the team

The Plan: Project Management team is part of the broader Plan Stage and focuses on building and improving GitLab’s Agile Planning and project management capabilities, so teams can plan, track, and deliver work effectively in a single platform. The team includes backend and frontend engineers, a product manager, and a UX designer who work in a fully remote, asynchronous way across multiple time zones, relying on issues, merge requests, and handbook-first documentation to stay aligned. We own core project management features such as planning boards, workflows, and related backend services, and are currently focused on improving performance, scalability, and usability as usage grows.