Principal Backend Engineer: Govern

An overview of this role

The Principal Engineer Govern provides technical leadership for the engineering teams in the sub-department working closely as a key member of the leadership team in collaboration with counterparts across the organization.

What you’ll do in this role

• Contribute to the overall direction of the Govern stage by collaborating and making proposals across several teams on their engineering work and helping their team members make informed decisions in alignment with strategic plans

• Teach mentor grow and provide advice to other domain experts and individual contributors across several teams. Advise on resourcing requirements and provide feedback on promotions into technical leadership roles

• Plan improvements and features with a 6 month view and ensure that OKR-level goals are aligned across the sub-department

• Solve technical problems of the highest scope complexity and ambiguity while looking for innovation opportunities between several teams and demonstrating a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of large complexity and scope

• Interface with Engineering Managers and Senior Management and enable Staff Engineers to engage on stage-level aspects of larger (sub-department wide) initiatives. Provide a point of escalation for sub-department teams facing complex technical challenges

• Propose initial technical implementations which support architectural changes that solve scaling and performance problems

• Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your sub-department

• Identify slow and inefficient code across multiple products

Examples of initiatives you will work on

• Key member of the team providing architectural leadership for initiatives across the Govern sub-department including Vulnerability and Dependency Management Compliance and Security Policies Authentication and Authorization SLSA L3 compliance and AI feature development

• Performance optimization - database decomposition technical debt initiatives scaling of features (moving features from the project to group to instance level) to support SaaS and self-managed customers

• Improved instrumentation and metrics to inform feature development and support results for customer

• Cross-stage alignment of technical direction within Secure and Govern and across all the stages in the DevSecOps lifecycle

What you’ll bring

• Significant professional experience as a Principal or Staff Engineer or relevant hands-on  management and leadership experience across multiple development teams.

• Significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails. Significant experience with Vue.js GraphQL and Postgres is also a plus.

• Expert knowledge and experience in CI/CD using DevSecOps best practices and a strong interest working across security and compliance development.

• Experience in scaling a mission-critical SaaS product.

• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate complex problems and solutions.

• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems.

• Comfort working in a highly agile intensely iterative software development process.

• Experience owning a project from concept to production including proposal discussion and execution.

About the team

The Govern sub-department engineering teams work to support the Govern stage direction to authenticate and give appropriate access within GitLab as well as develop and support features to help users manage security vulnerabilities and dependencies security policies compliance frameworks and secrets management across their organization.

What’s great about working at GitLab?

The culture here at GitLab is something we’re incredibly proud of. Some of the benefits you’ll be entitled to vary by the region or country you’re in. However all GitLab team members are fully remote and receive a 'no ask must tell' paid-time-off policy where we don’t count the number of days you take off annually -- instead we focus on your results. You can work the hours you choose enabled by our asynchronous approach to communication .

How GitLab will support you

• Benefits to support your health finances and well-being

• All remote asynchronous work environment

• Flexible Paid Time Off

• Team Member Resource Groups

• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Growth and development budget

• Parental leave

• Home office support

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 for 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.