Backend Engineer, Database

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At GitLab, developers are independent and self-organized individual contributors who work together as a tight team in a remote and agile way.

The Database Group works on developing solutions for scalability, application performance, data growth and developer enablement, especially where it concerns interactions with the database. In support of our Transparency value, the Database Group page includes links to the boards listing our current work in flight, team meeting recordings as well as our roadmap. Hopefully this is the type of work that gets you excited about joining the team, if so please read on!

Most backend developers work on all aspects of GitLab, building features, fixing bugs, and generally improving the application. The Database Group is responsible for making application changes to improve database performance, availability and reliability. Additionally, the Backend Engineer, Database will be expected to review database related code with the goal of eventually becoming a Database Maintainer.

The Work

Our work can be grouped into a couple of main categories: responsive and enablement. Categories that we consider responsive work are areas that require our immediate or near-term attention to help with performance, scaling and SQL expertise. Typically these involve reviewing slow performing queries and providing guidance on how to improve these queries. 

Enablement, as the name suggests, is about enabling development efficiencies for our greater development community and improving our scalability story for GitLab.com. We have some lofty goals on what we’d like to achieve in the next year. We cannot do all of the work we have identified by ourselves, so we are creating tools to enable teams to implement scalable solutions. Below is a list of a few of these initiatives:

• Database Partitioning
• Implementing cluster-wide unique identifiers for Cells Topology Service
• Load Balancer Improvements
• Automated database migration testing

What you'll do

• Develop new features in collaboration with our product management, UX, and frontend teams
• Keep changes small and iterate towards the best solution
• Reviewing database related changes submitted by other engineers or community contributors
• Documenting database …