Backend Engineer (Ruby), AI Engineering: Agent Foundations

An overview of this role

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer in GitLab's Agent Foundations stage, you'll go beyond using AI tools. You'll help build the foundations for GitLab's agentic AI experiences: the platform that lets AI agents work across the whole software delivery lifecycle, not just write code. That covers how agents are created, shared and connected to tools inside and outside GitLab, how they run, and how their work shows up and can be observed across GitLab.

In this role you'll work closely with engineers across the stage and other AI Engineering teams. This is a high-visibility area where GitLab's core platform meets its AI strategy.

What you'll do

• Develop, ship and maintain features for the Duo Agent Platform in the GitLab monolith (Ruby) and, where needed, the AI Gateway (Python). Keep them secure, well-tested and performant.
• Work with Product Management, UX, frontend, backend and AI specialists to refine requirements and ship improvements in small iterations.
• Design, implement and review GraphQL and REST APIs and the backend logic behind them, with reliable, scalable and clear contracts for clients.
• Improve and extend automated testing (RSpec and other frameworks) to strengthen quality and give developers faster feedback.
• Share standards, patterns and learnings with other engineers to raise the bar for responsible AI integration and evidence-driven engineering.
• Join Tier 2 on-call rotations to troubleshoot production issues, contribute to root cause analysis, and improve observability and resiliency.
• Keep an eye on the competitive landscape to help keep GitLab's agent platform best-in-class.

What you'll bring

• Experience building and maintaining production Ruby on Rails applications, including background jobs, APIs and data models.
• Comfort working across the stack in a mature codebase. Familiarity with Python backends and/or Vue frontends is a plus.
• Skill in designing or extending REST and/or GraphQL APIs with attention to scalability, maintainability and backward compatibility.
• Real enthusiasm for AI and hands-on experience using AI tools in your daily work. Experience designing and shipping AI-powered backend features or integrations is a plus.
• Proven SQL and experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including writing efficient queries and data modeling.
• Experience finding and fixing performance bottlenecks in applications.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including technical proposals and documentation, in a remote, async, cross-functional team.
• Openness to learning and to applying skills from related technologies or fields.

About the team

The Agent Foundations stage builds the foundations for GitLab's agentic AI experiences. We provide the platform, catalog and execution features that help teams deliver resilient agents and flows to customers. The stage has three groups: Agent Developer, AI Catalog and Agent Execution, they provide the core harness for GitLab’s agents, the tools Agent’s need to interact with GitLab as well as ways to configure and execute Agents across GitLab.Our engineers work async-first across EMEA and AMER timezones. We work with teams across AI engineering and the rest of GitLab so the Duo Agent Platform can power many of GitLab's AI features.