Backend Engineer, Database Excellence

As a Senior Backend Engineer with the Database Excellence group, you'll build and evolve the data frameworks and tooling that keep GitLab's application datastores scalable, healthy, and safe across both GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed instances. A primary focus for this role is building proactive data growth controls for GitLab.com, including retention and lifecycle management frameworks, enforcement of retention policies at schema-change time, and tooling that keeps database growth sustainable as AI-driven development accelerates how quickly data accumulates. You'll help teams across GitLab reason confidently about data architecture, placement, and lifecycle management, while proactively identifying saturation points in our GitLab.com infrastructure and driving corrective actions with partner teams. With the team's recent move into the Data Engineering organization, you'll also shape new scalability and data health features for self-managed customers, working hands-on with PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails in a fully remote, highly collaborative environment.

Some examples of our projects:

• Data Growth Controls (retention enforcement and data lifecycle management)
• SQL Traffic Replay Tooling
• Background Operations Framework

What you'll do

• Develop and iterate backend features and data frameworks that make it safe and efficient for GitLab teams to work with data at scale across SaaS and self-managed deployments.
• Design and build data retention and lifecycle management frameworks, including retention policy enforcement, bulk data removal tooling, and automated identification of tables that need retention policies.
• Build shift-left guardrails, such as static analysis checks and schema-change-time enforcement, that catch unsustainable data growth patterns before they reach production.
• Collaborate closely with product management, UX, frontend, infrastructure, software delivery, and analytics teams to design and ship high-performing solutions
• Review and improve database-related changes from other engineers and community contributors, ensuring data integrity, safety, and performance across all deployment scenarios.
• Design, build, and maintain tooling such as SQL traffic replay and background operations frameworks to proactively surface and address scalability and performance issues.
• Research, design, and implement improvements to data retention and lifecycle management, database performance, scalability, and data health, including areas like soft delete strategies and database migration testing.
• Document database best practices, patterns to avoid, and data architecture guidance to enable developers to make informed decisions.
• Develop proactive tooling and guardrails that help developers detect and remediate potential performance and data issues early in the development lifecycle.

An overview of this role