Senior Backend Engineer, Database Excellence (Ruby)

Responsibilities

• 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.

Languages