Senior Backend Engineer, Cloud Cost & Capacity
GitLab is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer, Cloud Cost & Capacity for a remote role open to applicants in India. Level rates it ; you can apply on GitLab.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
- This is listed as a remote role.
- The posting mentions BigQuery, Kubernetes and Opencost among its tools and skills.
- GitLab has 242 other open roles on Level.
- Posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
Senior backend engineer building cloud cost attribution and capacity planning pipelines for infrastructure supporting GitLab.
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, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.
*Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.
Senior Backend Engineer
As a Senior Backend Engineer on our Cloud Cost and Capacity capability, you'll build the internal software that helps us understand, attribute, and plan the cloud infrastructure that runs GitLab.com. You'll turn Google Cloud billing and usage data into pipelines, attribution models, and applications that help service owners understand what they consume and spend, plan reservations, and prevent capacity shortages.
You'll be the first engineer dedicated to this capability, setting the technical direction and building the foundations a growing team will extend. You'll treat cloud cost and capacity as one roadmap, choosing the architecture, data models, and tools that let service owners manage their usage and spending.
What you'll do
- Build data pipelines that turn Google Cloud billing exports and Cloud Monitoring telemetry into a clean, queryable picture of fleet usage and utilization in BigQuery.
- Attribute shared cost and usage across Google Kubernetes Engine clusters to the teams and services that drive them, using foundations such as OpenCost and Google Kubernetes Engine cost allocation.
- Develop capacity and demand tooling that profiles infrastructure needs by machine family and region to support reservation planning and prevent capacity shortages.
- Ship internal applications that let engineers and budget owners see and act on their cloud footprint, replacing manual snapshots and spreadsheets with software.
- Establish the data models, services, and engineering standards that future team members will extend, and help shape technical direction and hiring as we grow.
- Partner with Finance, product teams, service owners, and infrastructure engineers to turn their needs into technical designs.
- Use artificial intelligence in your daily engineering workflow to improve efficiency and outcomes, as we expect of all GitLab team members.
What you'll bring
- A track record of designing and shipping production backend services that you've owned end to end, beyond operating existing systems.
- Strong structured query language (SQL) skills with large datasets, experience building and maintaining data pipelines and models, and comfort working with cloud billing and usage data.
- Working knowledge of a major cloud platform, preferably Google Cloud, including compute services, Kubernetes, and pricing and billing models.
- Proficiency in a general-purpose programming language for tooling and pipelines. We value your ability to build and ship over mastery of a single language; Go and Python suit this work, and we use Ruby across our product code.
- The ability to break a new problem into milestones and drive it to production with light direction, communicating clearly in a remote, asynchronous environment.
- Helpful, not required: OpenCost, Kubecost, or Google Kubernetes Engine cost allocation; cloud financial management (FinOps) practices or certification; cost or capacity modeling, forecasting, or anomaly detection; Terraform; Looker, Looker Studio, or Grafana; founding engineering work; or artificial intelligence in engineering workflows.
About the team
We're part of the Cloud Cost Utilization team within Infrastructure Platforms, working with Fleet Management. We partner with Finance, product teams, service owners, and infrastructure engineers as our service-ownership model matures. You'll work with us asynchronously, using clear written communication to turn our partners' needs into technical designs.
How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees
- 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
Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.
Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.
Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.
GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.
How we rate this
Senior Backend Engineer, Cloud Cost & Capacity at GitLab rates 20 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Pay
- Typical software engineer job
- $167k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical software engineer figure when pay comes up. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where backend engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where data pipelines was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where cost optimization was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where cloud capacity was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used BigQuery in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Backend Engineering, Data Pipelines, Cost Optimization, Cloud Capacity, and BigQuery. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
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