Backend Developer, Edge

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 1,000 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.

We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.

Top 10 reasons to work for GitLab:

1. Work with helpful, kind, motivated, and talented people.
2. Work remote so you have no commute and are free to travel and move.
3. Have flexible work hours so you are there for other people and free to plan the day how you like.
4. Everyone works remote, but you don't feel remote. We don't have a head office, so you're not in a satellite office.
5. Work on open source software so you can interact with a large community and can show your work.
6. Work on a product you use every day: we drink our own wine.
7. Work on a product used by lots of people that care about what you do.
8. As a company we contribute more than we take, most of our work is released as the open source GitLab CE.
9. Focused on results, not on long hours, so that you can have a life and don't burn out.
10. Open internal processes: know what you're getting in to and be assured we're thoughtful and effective.

See our culture page for more!

Edge Backend Developers are primarily tasked with improving the productivity of the GitLab developers (from both GitLab Inc and the rest of the community), and making the GitLab project maintainable in the long-term.

See the description of the Edge team for more details. Edge Backend Developers report to the Edge Lead.

We are currently looking for backstage specialists, or developers with strong interest in this speciality. The position also involves working with the community as merge request coach, and working together with our issue triage specialists to respond and address issues from the community.

Responsibilities

• Take initiative in improving the software in small or large ways to address pain points in your own experience as a developer.
• Keep code easy to maintain and keep it easy for others to contribute code to GitLab.
• Manage and review code contributed by the rest of the community and work with them to get it ready for production.
• Support and collaborate with our service engineers in getting to the bottom of user-reported issues and come up with robust solutions.
• Engage with the core team and the open source community to collaborate on improving GitLab.
• Qualify developers for hiring.

Requirements

• You can reason about software, algorithms, and performance from a high level.
• You are passionate about open source.
• You have strong programming skills - Ruby and Rails.
• You know how to write your own Ruby gem using TDD techniques.
• You have worked on a production-level Ruby application, preferably using Rails. This is a strict requirement.
• Strong written communication skills.
• You are self-motivated and have strong organizational skills.
• You have an urge to collaborate and communicate asynchronously.
• You have an urge to document all the things so you don't need to learn the same thing twice.
• You have an urge to automate all the things so you don't need to do the same thing twice.
• You have a proactive, go-for-it attitude. When you see something broken, you can't help but fix it.
• You have an urge for delivering quickly and iterating fast.
• Experience with Docker, Nginx, Go, and Linux system administration a plus.
• Experience with online community development a plus.
• You share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
• A technical interview is part of the hiring process for this position.

Ruby experience

For this position, a significant amount of experience with Ruby is a strict requirement.

We would love to hire all great backend developers, regardless of the language they have most experience with, but at this point we are looking for developers who can get up and running within the GitLab code base very quickly and without requiring much training, which limits us to developers with a large amount of existing experience with Ruby, and preferably Rails too.

For a time, we also considered applicants with little or no Ruby and Rails experience for this position, because we realize that programming skills are to a large extent transferable between programming languages, but we are not currently doing that anymore for the reasons described in the merge request that removed the section from this listing that described that policy.

If you think you would be an asset to our engineering team regardless, please see if another position better fits your experiences and interests, or apply using the Open Application.

If you would still prefer to join the backend development team as a Ruby developer, please consider contributing to the open-source GitLab Community Edition. We frequently hire people from the community who have shown through contributions that they have the skills that we are looking for, even if they didn’t have much previous experience with those technologies, and we would gladly review those contributions.

Workflow

The basics of GitLab development can be found in the developer onboarding document.

The handbook details the complete GitLab Workflow.

Relevant links

• Engineering Handbook
• Engineering Workflow
• Edge Team
• Backstage speciality
• Issue Triage speciality

Hiring Process

Applicants for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Please keep in mind that applicants can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find her/his job title on our team page.

• Part of the application process is to provide links to some code. Some candidates want to share code privately, so if they do, we send them an email with our GitLab.com / GitHub / Bitbucket usernames and also invite them to email code to us.
• If the code looks good, we ask the candidate to answer two questions:
  • One about the GitLab codebase architecture.
  • One about proposing a boring solution about a specific topic the Edge team is focusing on.
• We also ask the candidate to triage / troubleshoot a GitLab issue and to review / coach a GitLab merge request (both in a fork of GitLab CE).
• Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30-minute screening call with our Global Recruiters.
• Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45-minute behavioral interview with the Edge Lead.
• Candidates will then be invited to schedule a technical interview with a Senior Developer.
• Candidates will be invited to schedule an interview with our VP of Engineering.
• Finally, candidates will have an interview with our CEO.
• Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email.

Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.