Staff Backend Engineer, Software Supply Chain Security

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 As an Engineering Manager, you’ll guide GitLab’s dedicated Software Supply Chain Security (SSCS) Add-On engineering team as it develops core capabilities including Dependency Firewall, Build Provenance, Malicious Packages detection, and Artifact Signing. This is a founding management role where you’ll help shape how the team works, partner closely with the Staff Backend Engineer, Product Manager, and SSCS stage management, and turn a defined roadmap into steady, high-quality delivery for enterprise customers with strict security and compliance needs. You’ll focus on developing the team, creating a healthy operating rhythm, and establishing predictable execution for the SSCS SKU. You’ll join a product area where customers in regulated industries are already validating the need, and your work will help GitLab deliver software supply chain security features that customers can rely on. While technical credibility matters, your main focus will be growing a strong backend engineering team, enabling team members in their development, and creating the conditions for long-term delivery and quality. WHAT YOU’LL DO * Guide a backend engineering team building the SSCS Add-On across dependency enforcement, build provenance, malicious package detection, and artifact signing. * Be responsible for Drive engineering delivery for general availability milestones by aligning sequencing, scope, and dependencies with the Staff Backend Engineer and Product Manager. * Develop the team by partnering with Talent Acquisition on sourcing, interview design, candidate evaluation, and hiring decisions. * Run regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations that enable growth and clear expectations. * Advance engineering quality by monitoring cycle time, defect rates, and test coverage, and by addressing risks early. * Coordinate quarterly planning and roadmap tradeoff discussions with SSCS stage leadership and Product. * Work with Finance and other partners on headcount pacing and team planning as the Add-On scales. * Represent the SSCS Add-On team within stage leadership discussions and help ensure strong communication across functions. WHAT YOU’LL BRING * Over 3 years of experience guiding backend product engineering teams in security, DevOps, or platform engineering environments. * Ability to hire and grow backend or security engineers in distributed team environments, with practical understanding of the talent landscape for these roles. * Technical credibility to contribute to architecture discussions involving package registries, CI/CD pipeline security, and signing infrastructure. * Experience managing predictable delivery across multi-quarter product roadmaps and managing cross-team dependencies. * Comfort working in an asynchronous, documentation-driven organization with clear written communication. * Familiarity with supply chain security, artifact management, or compliance-focused product areas, or transferable experience from related domains. * Working knowledge of concepts related to frameworks and ecosystems such as SLSA and Sigstore. * Ability to build credibility with engineers, product partners, and customer-facing stakeholders through clear judgment, coaching, and teamwork. ABOUT THE TEAM The SSCS Add-On team is a product engineering team within GitLab’s Software Supply Chain Security stage. We work on key capabilities in the SSCS Add-On SKU and collaborate closely with product and engineering partners to deliver security features for customers operating in regulated environments. You’ll report to the SSCS Senior Engineering Manager and partner directly with the Staff Backend Engineer and Product Manager. As a distributed team working asynchronously across regions, we are focused on strong delivery practices, team health, and scaling the product area with clarity and accountability. For more on how related teams work, see Team Handbook Page. HOW GITLAB SUPPORTS FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES * Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being * Flexible Paid Time Off  * Team Member Resource Groups * Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan * Growth and Development Fund * Parental Leave  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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Country 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 status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.

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 As a Staff Engineer on the GitLab Delivery - Upgrades team, you’ll guide the technical direction for GitLab’s self-managed deployment strategy so customers can deploy, upgrade, and run GitLab reliably in their own infrastructure with minimal disruption. You’ll serve as a technical anchor for the team, working closely with your engineering manager, product manager, and partners across Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development to shape cloud-native, operator-driven deployment patterns that reduce operational complexity and upgrade friction. In your first year, you’ll help define the architecture for zero-downtime upgrades, strengthen observability and reliability practices, and guide the next generation of deployment automation for self-managed GitLab environments. Some examples of our projects: * Evolving GitLab Operator and Helm charts to support zero-downtime upgrades for complex, stateful GitLab installations * Advancing the GitLab Environment Toolkit to simplify large-scale, production-ready self-managed deployments WHAT YOU’LL DO * Guide the technical vision and architecture for GitLab’s cloud-native, self-managed deployments and upgrade workflows. * Establish operational maturity standards, service integration patterns, and deployment models that help development teams manage the lifecycle of their components. * Design and maintain Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tooling for self-managed GitLab deployments across varied environments. * Develop automation and integration frameworks for database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback paths. * Define database and application lifecycle strategies, including safe PostgreSQL migration approaches and validation mechanisms that reduce downtime risk. * Work with Product Management, GitLab.com Site Reliability Engineering, GitLab Dedicated, and development teams to align deployment patterns with customer needs. * Mentor engineers and enable customer-facing teams through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and runbooks. * Drive observability, testing, performance, and resilience practices for self-managed deployments, and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning. WHAT YOU’LL BRING * Strong software engineering experience designing and delivering production systems that customers install and operate in their own infrastructure. * Proficiency in Go for large, complex codebases, with familiarity with Ruby on Rails and Rails application architecture as a useful addition. * Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production, including building and maintaining Operators, designing Helm charts for stateful applications, and working with Custom Resource Definitions, admission controllers, and controller patterns. * Knowledge of cloud-native systems and tooling, such as service mesh, observability stacks, infrastructure as code, and automation tools like Terraform or Ansible. * Experience with stateful workloads and databases, including PostgreSQL schema design and migrations, persistent volumes, storage classes, and approaches for reducing downtime during upgrades. * Understanding of Linux systems and production operations, including package management, systemd, system-level debugging, observability, incident response, and on-call participation. * Ability to guide through influence, including writing clear technical proposals, documenting decisions, mentoring engineers, and working effectively across teams. * Interest in open source infrastructure or deployment tooling, or transferable experience from adjacent domains, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to different audiences. ABOUT THE TEAM The Delivery - Upgrades team sits within GitLab Delivery and focuses on delivering GitLab to self-managed users through supported, validated deployment tooling. We own and evolve the GitLab Omnibus package, Helm charts, GitLab Operator, and the GitLab Environment Toolkit, and we work asynchronously across regions with partners in Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development. Our work centers on enabling zero-downtime upgrades, reducing operational complexity at scale, supporting GitLab’s cloud-native transition while continuing to serve existing deployments, and improving the upgrade experience for customers running GitLab in diverse environments. For more on how we work, see [Link: Team Handbook Page]. HOW GITLAB SUPPORTS FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES * Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being * Flexible Paid Time Off  * Team Member Resource Groups * Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan * Growth and Development Fund * Parental Leave  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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Country 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 status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.