Staff Backend Engineer, SSCS: AI Governance

GitLab is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer, SSCS: AI Governance in India.

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, in

Responsibilities

• Define and drive backend architecture for AI governance systems, including auditability, policy enforcement, and enterprise reporting capabilities, to improve governance coverage and enable reliable enterprise adoption.

• Design the AI audit event system, including event schema, pipelines, storage patterns, retention considerations, and export surfaces, to deliver reliable audit visibility and support customer reporting and compliance requirements.

• Build and guide the integration layer between the Duo Agent Platform and governance capabilities so agent actions can be observed and controlled at the right points in execution, reducing governance gaps across agent workflows.

• Guide technical design for tool and registry governance, including metadata models, permissions, and controls for managed tool usage, enabling safer, more consistent, and more governable tool access.

• Define backend foundations for a declarative policy framework that governs which agents and tools can be used under specific conditions, helping customers enforce governance requirements consistently across environments.

• Drive architectural consistency and implementation quality across teams by reviewing significant merge requests and contributing to technical RFCs, thus mitigating design drift as the product evolves.

• Strengthen team effectiveness and technical decision-making by mentoring other engineers, providing design guidance and feedback, and coordinating efforts across teams to raise the overall technical bar.

• Accelerate delivery and improve consistency across shared initiatives by partnering with engineering teams to align the governance architecture with existing platform patterns and the broader product direction.

What you’ll bring

• Strong experience designing and operating backend systems at scale, especially in domains that require auditability, governance, or compliance.

• Deep knowledge of authorization and access control patterns, such as role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), and policy-as-code approaches.

• Strong Ruby on Rails experience in production SaaS environments.

• Strong Python experience, especially in systems related to AI services, orchestration layers, or service integrations.

• Experience designing REST APIs and GraphQL APIs for internal or external platform use.

• Familiarity with high-scale data and storage systems, including technologies such as Postgres and ClickHouse.

• Proven experience guiding large, cross-team technical efforts in an async, RFC-driven engineering environment.

About GitLab

You'll join the AI Governance team within GitLab's Secure, Scale, and Compliance area. We focus on helping organizations gain visibility into and govern AI usage inside GitLab. Our work spans two broad problem spaces: visibility, such as audit events, usage tracking, and observability, and policy controls, such as controls that help protect projects and meet compliance requirements. We are building this team alongside a parallel AI Governance team, with both groups contributing to different part