Staff Backend Engineer, Analytics Instrumentation (Golang)

An overview of this role

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll set the technical direction for our instrumentation platform, guide architecture for a foundational service, and mentor engineers across the company. You'll establish patterns that help teams build reliable, scalable instrumentation that improves billing accuracy, product insights, and long-term growth.

What you’ll do

• Architect and guide the design of a unified Go-based instrumentation service, setting the technical direction to replace multiple language-specific SDKs and maintain reliable, high-performance instrumentation across the company.
• Own the strategy for handling, validating, and improving instrumentation data quality across the system, increasing billing accuracy and strengthening product planning.
• Coordinate mentorship and training initiatives with product development teams across the company, improving adoption of instrumentation best practices and raising the quality and consistency of feature instrumentation.
• Set reliability and turnaround standards for systems that enable usage billing and instrumentation, contribute to critical-incident on-call coverage, and coordinate post-incident improvements that reduce recurring issues.
• Coordinate cross-functional initiatives across research and development teams and the enterprise data organization, aligning evolving requirements and delivering solutions that serve multiple stakeholders across the company.
• Own key architectural choices that balance ease of use for product teams with reliability and correctness for data consumers, establishing patterns that scale the system as a foundational service for company-wide growth.

What you’ll bring

• Extensive production experience with Go, with a proven track record of architecting and shipping large-scale services used by multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to design and own backend systems that scale, with experience shaping architectural choices that influence multiple engineering teams.
• Deep expertise in infrastructure concerns including system reliability, performance optimization at scale, data quality, and observability; proven ability to set standards and mentor others in these areas.
• Proven experience designing and owning APIs (REST, gRPC, or similar) that scale to serve multiple internal teams, with the ability to evolve designs based on diverse stakeholder needs.
• Experience coordinating initiatives across functional boundaries, influencing product teams, data consumers, and other stakeholders through technical vision and mentorship.
• Deep expertise in instrumentation, analytics, data systems, or similar foundational infrastructure; demonstrated impact building systems that become critical to company operations.

About the team

Our team is part of the Data Engineering organization and runs a foundational service used by all research and development teams at GitLab. We manage the systems that send, transport, and validate instrumentation data across the company, giving us visibility into customer usage patterns across GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed deployment environments. This data informs usage billing and product planning. We're building a unified, Go-based instrumentation service that replaces multiple language-specific SDKs, making it easier for teams to instrument their features while ensuring data integrity for billing and analysis. As a distributed team working asynchronously across multiple time zones, we work closely with product and engineering teams across the company and provide guidance on instrumenting features effectively.