Backend Engineer, Database - Remote, Permanent - GitLab, Inc

This position is 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 Database Group(
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/database/)
works on developing solutions for scalability, application performance,
data growth and developer enablement, especially where it concerns
interactions with the database. In support of our Transparency (
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency) value, the Database
Group page includes links to the boards listing our current work in flight,
team meeting recordings as well as our roadmap. Hopefully this is the type
of work that gets you excited about joining the team, if so please read on!

Most backend developers work on all aspects of GitLab, building features,
fixing bugs, and generally improving the application. The Database Group is
responsible for making application changes to improve database performance,
availability and reliability. Additionally, the Backend Engineer, Database
(
https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/backend-engineer/#database)
will be expected to review database related code with the goal of
eventually becoming a Database Maintainer (
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/database/#database-maintainer
).

The Work

Our work can be grouped into a couple of main categories: responsive and
enablement. Categories that we consider responsive work are areas that
require our immediate or near-term attention to help with performance,
scaling and SQL expertise. Typically these involve reviewing slow
performing queries and providing guidance on how to improve these queries.

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:

Automated database migration testing -
https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/database-team/-/epics/6

Database Partitioning - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2023

Reduce total size and growth of GitLab.com's PostgreSQL database -
https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4181

Address Primary Key overflow risk for tables with an integer PK -
https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4785

Feature - Automate feedback of database query performance into GitLab (Epic
TBD)

Responsibilities

Develop new features in collaboration with our product management, UX, and
frontend teams.

Keep changes small and iterate towards the best solution.

Reviewing database related changes submitted by other engineers or
community contributors

Documenting database 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

Requirements

Significant professional software engineering experience with PostgreSQL in
large production environments

Significant experience with Ruby on Rails or other Ruby frameworks

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

Enterprise software company experience

Developer platform/tool industry experience

Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team

Computer science education or equivalent experience

Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools

Still interested or have more questions? Go to
https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/ and feel free to reach out with
questions.

Thanks for looking!