Senior Backend Engineer, Platform Readiness

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 validation.

You'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 do

• Contribute 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 requirements
• Evolve 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 domains
• Build integration surfaces that enable feature teams to engage the Platform Readiness team where they already work: issues, merge requests, design documents, and CI/CD pipelines
• Partner with platform teams (Infrastructure, Security, Data) to translate their expertise into structured platform requirements, domain skills, and validation logic without requiring specific domain knowledge
• Contribute 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 relevance
• Mentor other engineers on the team in agentic-workflow standards, prompt discipline, evaluation methodology, and the principles of human-AI collaboration in platform readiness
• Contribute to technical documentation and architectural decision records that document the Platform Readiness team's technical evolution and rationale for key design choices

What you'll bring

Required Experience & Skills

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2+ years in backend, platform, or developer-facing tooling
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node, Python, or Golang (Ruby a plus)
• Experience shipping developer-facing tooling where the primary user is another engineer
• Understanding of GitLab-style development workflows (issues, epics, merge requests, CI/CD, code review) as first-class artifacts that automation can read and reason about
• Ability to work in cross-functional environments across multiple platform teams
• Experience with structured content systems, schemas, or validation tooling

Highly Valued Experience

• Experience 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 own
• Experience integrating with LLM APIs and reasoning about cost, latency, evaluation, and failure modes
• Background in developer experience or platform engineering
• Experience with governance patterns for shared standards and cross-org decision-making
• Open source contribution history in platform, developer experience, or AI infrastructure
• PostgreSQL or other relational database experience at scale

What Makes You Stand Out (Strong Plus)

• You've shipped agentic workflows in production and dealt with the operational complexities of AI-driven automation
• You have experience designing schema-driven content systems with non-engineer authors and evolving them as requirements change
• You've built developer platform teams at scale and understand the dynamics of enabling other engineers
• You have observability and monitoring experience for AI systems, including evaluation metrics, cost tracking, and failure analysis
• You can explain complex concepts (agentic workflows, platform readiness, governance) clearly to platform teams, feature teams, product managers, and executives

About the team

The 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 trust
• Building a structured, machine-readable requirements body: Evolving the platform requirements schema to capture the full scope of platform readiness concerns across all domains and platforms
• Making 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 knowledge
• Building the measurement systems to know we're working: Creating observability and evaluation frameworks that give us confidence in agentic-workflow decisions and surface failures early

Team 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 patterns.

• Highlight any experience you have with Kubernetes, Terraform, or Helm in your resume and be ready to discuss concrete projects.
• Prepare a short walkthrough of a deployment pipeline you built or improved; include challenges and outcomes.
• Showcase documentation samples that demonstrate clear, developer‑focused writing.
• Expect interviewers to ask scenario‑based questions about designing production‑like environments; think about isolation, reproducibility, and cost.
• When negotiating, emphasize the value of equity and remote work allowances, not just base salary.
• Watch for vague promises about “flexible hours” without clear expectations around core overlap times; clarify communication expectations early.