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An overview of this role
As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Tenant Scale: Git team, you'll help improve one of the most widely used foundations of modern software development. Git is at the core of how developers collaborate, and this role focuses on making Git and Gitaly more capable, reliable, and efficient for GitLab and the people who use our platform. You'll contribute directly to upstream Git, help shape technical direction, and connect open source community discussions with GitLab product needs.
Reporting to the Git team lead, you'll work across Git and Gitaly to deliver changes that improve repository access, performance, and long-term maintainability. This is a unique opportunity to influence both an essential open source project and the systems GitLab uses to serve repositories at scale, while helping guide larger efforts that affect the future direction of Git.
- Some examples of our projects: contributing new features and fixes to upstream Git, and adapting Gitaly to make effective use of new and existing Git capabilities
What you’ll do
- Participate in architectural discussions and technical decisions related to Git and Gitaly, helping drive implementation choices that improve correctness, performance, and maintainability.
- Contribute features, bug fixes, and performance improvements to upstream Git in line with team and community goals, delivering changes that improve repository access and reliability for users.
- Adapt Gitaly to make effective use of Git capabilities, including integrating newly available features to improve scalability, efficiency, and long-term maintainability.
- Connect discussions in the open source Git project with GitLab's product direction and engineering work, helping align upstream contributions with product and platform needs.
- Scope tasks, estimate effort, and describe implementation plans that support the team's priorities and enable predictable delivery of technical work.
- Test and validate the features you build and integrate, with a focus on correctness and reliability to reduce regressions and support stable production use.
- Collaborate with team members, contributors and the Git ecosystem
- Represent GitLab as a constructive participant in the open source ecosystem, building productive relationships that support ongoing collaboration with the Git community.
What you’ll bring
- Experience building instrumented, observable software systems.
- Knowledge of Git internals, including its code and data structures, or practical experience operating Git servers.
- Experience writing and testing production-quality code in C.
- Experience contributing to open source projects, including Git or similar systems, and working effectively in public collaboration spaces.
- Familiarity with Go for backend development and understanding of Linux internals such as processes, memory management, input/output, and filesystems.
- Interest or experience in large-scale or distributed systems, storage formats, graph theory, or highly available production environments, including transferable backend or infrastructure experience.
About the team
The Tenant Scale: Git team works on the Git capabilities that underpin repository access in GitLab, with a strong connection to Gitaly and the upstream Git project. The team contributes directly to open source Git, improves how GitLab uses Git in production, and helps shape technical direction in areas such as performance, correctness, and maintainability. Team members collaborate asynchronously across regions, balancing internal engineering needs with active participation in public open source discussions. For more on the domain this role supports, see the Team Direction Page.
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Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.
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