An overview of this role
As a Senior Backend Engineer on the GitLab Agent Tools team, you'll go beyond using AI tools and help define how we design, build systems that allow AI agents to interact with the full software delivery lifecycle, way beyond pure code creation. This encompasses GitLab's MCP server as well as future technologies that are aimed at providing AI agents ways to interact with GitLab. In this role you'll take end-to-end ownership of complex features and help establish architectural patterns for how GitLab exposes its rich functionality to AI agents.
You'll collaborate closely with engineers across the Agent Foundations stage and adjacent teams within AI engineering. This is a high-visibility area of the product at the intersection of GitLab's core platform and its AI strategy.
What you'll do
- Develop, ship, and maintain features and improvements for Agentic Tools across the GitLab monolith backend in a secure, well-tested, and performant way.
- Collaborate with Product Management, UX, frontend, backend, and AI specialists to refine requirements and deliver high-quality, iterative product enhancements.
- Design, implement, and review GraphQL, REST APIs and related backend logic, ensuring reliability, scalability, and clear contracts with frontend clients.
- Improve and extend automated testing, including RSpec and other frameworks, to strengthen quality, reliability, and developer feedback loops.
- Share standards, patterns, and learnings with other engineers, raising the bar for responsible AI integration and evidence-driven engineering across the team.
- Help establish architectural patterns for how GitLab exposes its rich functionality to AI agents.
- Contribute to production issue troubleshooting through on-call rotations.
- Analyze the competitive landscape to help keep GitLab's MCP server best-in-class in an increasingly agentic world.
What you'll bring
- 5+ years of experience building and maintaining production applications with Ruby on Rails, including work with background jobs, APIs, and data models.
- Comfortable working across the stack in a mature codebase. Familiarity with Python backends and/or Vue frontends is a plus.
- Proficiency in designing or extending REST and/or GraphQL APIs with attention to scalability, maintainability, and backward compatibility.
- Experience with automated testing frameworks, such as RSpec.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.
- A passion for AI and its potential to transform the software development lifecycle.
