Staff Backend Engineer - Analytics Instrumentation

An overview of this role
Analytics Instrumentation is part of the Data Engineering and Monetization (DE&M) group, focused on the collection of Product Usage and Billing event data within GitLab. We build data collection platforms that enable product teams to assess user behavior and make evidence-based choices through privacy-conscious instrumentation that captures product usage throughout the user lifecycle.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you’ll guide the design and development of a unified data infrastructure platform that consolidates analytics instrumentation across GitLab’s engineering organization. You’ll build and maintain backend systems that give the company visibility into customer usage patterns across GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed deployment environments. That data directly informs strategic product priorities and strategies. This role offers the opportunity to work on foundational infrastructure that simplifies instrumentation for teams at GitLab, replacing the complexity of multiple language-specific software development kits with a single, unified solution that teams can rely on.

What you’ll do

• Guide the design, implementation, and evolution of a unified data collection platform using Golang, Kubernetes, ClickHouse, and NATS, with success measured by reliability, performance, and adoption across GitLab teams.
• Improve the emission, transit, and quality of instrumentation data across the system, with success measured by data quality, data integrity, and usage billing accuracy.
• Provide technical guidance for usage billing and instrumentation systems during working hours, with success measured by timely incident handling, effective root cause analysis, and reliable service restoration.
• Work across the organization with research and development teams and the enterprise data organization to deliver common solutions, with success measured by adoption across multiple stakeholders.
• Make technical choices that balance ease of use for product teams with reliability and correctness for data consumers, with success measured by platform usability and reliable downstream data.
• Mentor other engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and clear technical documentation, with success measured by stronger code quality, faster technical alignment, and more maintainable systems.

What you’ll bring

• Significant experience working with platform or infrastructure systems in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in the Go programming language, with experience building and maintaining production services.
• Strong backend development experience, with the ability to design and deliver scalable, reliable systems serving internal and external customers.
• Experience guiding technical design and making tradeoffs across system reliability, performance at scale, data quality, and observability.
• Experience working across team boundaries with product teams, data consumers, and other internal stakeholders.
• Familiarity with cloud native technologies and open source development practices.
• A track record of mentoring other engineers and helping teams make clear, well-documented technical choices.

About the team
The Analytics Instrumentation team operates at the intersection of Product, Analytics, and customer-facing teams, providing data collection infrastructure that serves engineering teams across GitLab. We’re a distributed team of generalist engineers who tackle complex problems spanning the GitLab codebase, JavaScript, Go, and Python satellite services, data pipelines, and AI tool integration. We collaborate transparently across teams, deliver measurable results through efficient iteration, and build inclusive solutions that respect user privacy. Our work enables data-informed choices and planning across the organization. We’re involved in diverse projects from event data collection and privacy compliance tools to AI-powered analytics frameworks that help GitLab teams learn more about their users.