Staff Backend Engineer, Knowledge Graph – Rust

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in India.

📋 Description

• Take the lead in the design and advancement of essential Knowledge Graph services within a production Rust codebase, which includes the graph query engine, SDLC and code indexing pipelines, as well as API/MCP interfaces that are utilized by other GitLab teams and AI agents.

• Oversee intricate, cross-functional initiatives that encompass GitLab Rails, the Data Insights Platform (Siphon, NATS, ClickHouse), and the GitLab Duo Agent Platform, guiding them from technical direction and design documentation through to implementation, rollout, and refinement.

• Drive decisions regarding system design to enhance reliability, scalability, and maintainability for analytical (OLAP-style) graph workloads, including multi-hop traversals, aggregations, and multi-tenant isolation. Document trade-offs to enable the broader team to act swiftly and remain aligned.

• Establish and enhance operational maturity for the service, covering service level objectives (SLOs), observability, runbooks, incident response, capacity planning, and production readiness (PREP) for GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments.

• Work collaboratively in an asynchronous manner with product, data, infrastructure, security, and AI teams to prioritize tasks, remove platform-level dependencies, and implement features in a manner that is safe for customers and sustainable for the team.

• Responsibly apply AI-assisted development workflows (such as utilizing MCP-aware tools, Knowledge Graph-supported agents, and internal Duo tooling), and contribute to establishing practical norms for the team’s use of AI while maintaining strong engineering judgment.

• Provide mentoring and support to fellow engineers through pairing, technical design reviews, and knowledge-sharing, reinforcing the collective ownership of the system and its operational sustainability.

• Engage across the stack as necessary, which may include occasional Ruby (Rails integration and authorization paths) or frontend tasks (such as the Software Architecture Map UI) to bridge gaps and maintain progress in delivery.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive experience in building and managing production backend systems, with a proven history of ensuring reliability, maintainability, and on-call readiness for services that support other product teams or platforms.

• Strong engineering expertise in Rust, or demonstrable capability to quickly adapt and deliver within a Rust-first, performance-sensitive backend codebase.

• Proficient system design skills, which include making and articulating clear architectural decisions, documenting constraints, and aligning trade-offs with product and platform necessities.

• Solid understanding of how to prepare and structure information for AI agents, including curation and organization of input, designing systems that facilitate effective LLM-powered behavior, and managing context windows and token usage.

• Ability to navigate ambiguous environments with a self-directed approach and demonstrated capability to identify issues, drive solutions, and take ownership.

• Experience with distributed data or analytics systems (e.g., OLAP databases like ClickHouse or columnar stores, Kafka or NATS-style messaging, or change data capture (CDC) pipelines), with comfort in reasoning about trade-offs in this domain.

• Familiarity with graph data modeling and/or query patterns (property graphs, Cypher/GQL, n-hop traversals, aggregations), or a strong desire to develop expertise in this area while in the role.

• Practical experience utilizing AI tools in daily development, with the ability to articulate how prompts are structured, validate outputs, and integrate AI assistance into a disciplined engineering workflow.

• A language-agnostic mindset with evidence of the ability to learn new languages and frameworks as required by the problem (e.g., Ruby, Go, or TypeScript/Vue in related areas of the stack).

• Excellent written communication skills and comfort in collaborating asynchronously across teams and time zones in a fully remote environment.

• A genuine interest in contributing to the growth of others through mentoring, thoughtful code reviews, and sharing context as the team expands and more customers adopt Knowledge Graph.

🏝️ Benefits

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being

• Flexible Paid Time Off

• Team Member Resource Groups

• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Growth and Development Fund

• Parental leave

• Home office support