Intermediate Backend Engineer (RoR), Plan

At GitLab, developers are independent and self-organized individual contributors who work together as a tight team in a remote and agile way.

Most backend developers work on all aspects of GitLab, building features, fixing bugs, and generally improving the application.  The responsibilities of the Plan team are described by the Plan stage. Among other things, this means working on GitLab’s functionality around issues, boards, milestones, to-do list, issue lists and filtering, roadmaps, time tracking, requirements management, notifications, value stream analytics (VSA), wiki, and pages.

The Plan stage is currently hiring for 3 separate teams. We will assess your skillsets against all 3 teams to determine best fit.

Product Planning:

The Product Planning group at GitLab is responsible for developing enterprise agile planning solutions that empower large engineering divisions to plan their work efficiently. Our distributed team leverages Ruby on Rails to build scalable, high-performance features that are seamlessly integrated into the GitLab product. We drive the adoption of modern technologies such as GraphQL and optimize the handling of extensive issue data within our PostgreSQL databases. By collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and engineers across various regions, we shape the strategic direction of our feature suite, enhancing functionalities like epics, roadmaps, and agile workflows, all through the use of our new work items framework. We prioritize innovation, continuous learning, and direct collaboration with our customers, providing opportunities to solve complex challenges and make a significant impact on millions of users.

Project Management:

The Project Management group at GitLab is responsible for developing cutting-edge project management solutions that empower teams worldwide. Our distributed team leverages Ruby on Rails to build scalable, high-performance features seamlessly integrated into the GitLab product. We drive the adoption of modern technologies such as GraphQL and optimize the handling of extensive issue data within our PostgreSQL databases. By collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and engineers across various regions, we shape the strategic direction of our project management suite, enhancing functionalities like issue tracking, milestone planning, and agile workflows, all through the use of our new work items framework. We prioritize innovation, continuous learning, and direct collaboration with our customers, providing opportunities to solve complex challenges and make a significant impact on millions of users.

Knowledge:

Knowledge is a small team owning GitLab Wiki, GitLab Pages, and everything related to markdown and text editing in GitLab. Our next focus is transforming GitLab Wiki from a simple Git wrapper to a fully-featured knowledge management solution with search, intuitive navigation, comments, permissions, etc. We also maintain GitLab Pages - a very popular static website hosting solution written in Go, focusing on ensuring high availability and performance. And we manage markdown features across GitLab, powered by a Rust-based parser, adding dynamic capabilities like link expansions and more.

 Responsibilities

• Develop features and improvements to the GitLab product in a secure, well-tested, and performant way
• Collaborate with stakeholders within Engineering (Frontend, UX, etc.) to maintain a high bar for quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment
• Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance
• Solve technical problems of moderate scope and complexity.
• Craft code that meets our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment.
• Conduct Code Review within our Code Review Guidelines and ensure community contributions receive a swift response.
• Recognize impediments to our efficiency as a team ("technical debt"), propose and implement solutions
• Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around specific projects and community contributions.
• Confidently ship small features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger projects.
• Participate in Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday and weekend and occasional night on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

Requirements

• Significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails
• Professional experience with PostgreSQL or a comparable RDBMS
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment
• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions
• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
• Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process
• Demonstrated ability to onboard and integrate with an organization long-term
• Positive and solution-oriented mindset
• Effective communication skills: Regularly achieve consensus with peers, and clear status updates
• An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility
• Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.
• Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values
• Ability to thrive in a fully remote organization
• Ability to use GitLab
• Comfort and familiarity with our code review process

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in a peak performance organization, preferably a tech startup
• An understanding of ActiveRecord, GraphQL, and Sidekiq
• Experience with the GitLab product as a user or contributor
• Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools
• 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