Backend Engineer

GitLab features must ship successfully across four distinct deployment platforms—Self-Managed, Dedicated, Dedicated for Government, and GitLab.com. Today, developers routinely discover platform compatibility issues late in development, triggering costly rework, delays, and emergency escalations. The Platform Readiness team is building an internal developer tooling capability that embeds platform readiness intelligence directly into GitLab's software development lifecycle to solve this problem. As a Senior Backend Engineer on the newly established Platform Readiness team, you'll architect and evolve the systems that enable features to ship successfully across all platforms by automating the evaluation of platform readiness requirements and surfacing risks early. You'll be a technical anchor for the team, driving the evolution of platform readiness from manual, ad-hoc assessments toward intelligent, agentic automation. What you'll do - Contribute to the Platform Readiness team's agentic workflows on the Duo Agent Platform: design, implement, and evolve the Core Agentic Workflow and the Requirements Agent - Evolve the platform requirements knowledge base: contribute to schema design, validation tooling, and CI systems - Build integration surfaces that enable feature teams to engage the Platform Readiness team where they already work: issues, merge requests, design documents, and CI/CD pipelines - Partner with platform teams (Infrastructure, Security, Data) to translate their expertise into structured platform requirements - Contribute to the quality control feedback loop: design systems that surface assessment errors and missed gaps - Mentor other engineers on the team in agentic-workflow standards, prompt discipline, and human-AI collaboration - Contribute to technical documentation and architectural decision records What you'll bring Required Experience & Skills - 5+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2+ years in backend, platform, or developer-facing tooling - Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node, Python, or Golang (Ruby a plus) - Experience shipping developer-facing tooling where the primary user is another engineer - Understanding of GitLab-style development workflows (issues, epics, merge requests, CI/CD, code review) - Ability to work in cross-functional environments across multiple platform teams - Experience with structured content systems, schemas, or validation tooling Highly Valued Experience - Experience with AI/agentic systems (DAP, ADK, LangGraph, or similar) - Experience integrating with LLM APIs - Background in developer experience or platform engineering - Experience with governance patterns for shared standards - Open source contribution history in platform, developer experience, or AI infrastructure - PostgreSQL or other relational database experience at scale What Makes You Stand Out - Shipped agentic workflows in production - Experience designing schema-driven content systems with non-engineer authors - Built developer platform teams at scale - Observability and monitoring experience for AI systems - Ability to explain complex concepts clearly to various stakeholders