Intermediate Backend Engineer (Go), Runner

An overview of this role

This Backend Engineer position for our Verify: CI Functions Platform team is 100% remote.

As a Backend Engineer in our Verify: CI Functions Platform team, you'll play a key role on a team whose mission is to re-architect GitLab Runner to support ultra-scale CI/CD operations and build the foundational platform for CI Functions (formerly CI/CD Steps). The CI Functions Platform team is part of the Verify: Runner organization and works in parallel with the Verify: Runner Core team to enable GitLab CI/CD to scale to support 100,000+ developers while providing composable, reusable execution components that make CI/CD pipelines easier to maintain and more powerful.

Our Verify: CI Functions Platform team is responsible for the architectural foundation that enables GitLab Runner to execute reusable CI/CD steps at enterprise scale. CI Functions allow customers to compose their CI/CD jobs from reusable, testable components rather than complex scripts, similar to how GitHub Actions and drone.io provide composability. The Step Runner component we build executes these functions across various platforms and ecosystems, whether running on cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, or on-premise installations.

Some of the things we have recently been working on include:

• Developing the Step Runner

• CI Functions syntax and implementation

• Runner re-architecture for ultra-scale

• Integration with GitLab Runner for steps execution

Our team handbook page has more details on how we work as a team. Learn more about CI Functions in the CI/CD Steps documentation and the GitLab Steps architecture blueprint.

What you'll do

• Contribute to the overall direction of GitLab Runner re-architecture and CI Functions development.

• Focus your efforts on building a scalable foundation for CI Functions execution.

• Help architect and build the Step Runner component that executes CI Functions across diverse infrastructure.

• Solve technical problems of medium scope and complexity.

• Help to define and improve our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.

• Represent GitLab and its values in public communication around broader initiatives, specific projects, and community contributions.

• Confidently ship moderately sized features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members.

• Collaborate with the team on larger projects and coordinate with the Runner Core team on parallel scaling efforts.

• Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance.

• Participate in Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday, weekend, and/or occasional night on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues.

What you’ll bring 

• Professional experience with Go in a large scale environment.

• Experience in scaling SaaS products.

• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.

• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative 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.

• Demonstrated ability to onboard and integrate with an organization long-term.

• Positive and solution-oriented mindset.

• Effective communication skills: Regularly achieve consensus with peers and clear status updates.

• An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility.

• Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational skills.

• Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization

• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values

You’ll stand out if you bring

• Demonstrated experience with any major cloud providers or infrastructure-as-code tools.

• Demonstrated experience working with Docker and Kubernetes.

• Demonstrated experience with site reliability

About the team

The team is made up of experienced Engineers with a passion for solving problems and creating usable solutions; located across different time zones, async communication and manager of one is core to how we continue to deliver value to users. The Verify:Runner team cares deeply about GitLab’s core values and has principles that align with those values. The team regularly interacts with community contributors, customers, and other GitLab teams as we strive to create lovable DevSecOps features.

Remote-Global