Backend Engineer (Ruby), AI Engineering: Duo Agent Platform Tools
An overview of this role
As an Intermediate 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 contribute to the development 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.
- Participate in Tier 2 on-call rotations to maintain the reliability of our services, and proactively improve system observability to troubleshoot and resolve production issues.
What you'll bring
- 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 a plus.
- Proficiency in designing or extending REST and/or GraphQL APIs with attention to scalability, maintainability, and backward compatibility.
- Practical experience or a strong interest in AI tooling and developing backend features that integrate with AI systems.
- Strong SQL skills and familiarity with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including writing efficient queries and understanding data modeling.
- Eagerness to learn, collaborate asynchronously, and adapt insights from adjacent fields to improve the GitLab product.
- Excellent communication skills for writing technical documentation, participating in code reviews, and collaborating effectively in a remote-first, global environment.
