Dev Career Framework: Senior Backend Engineer

Dev Senior Backend Engineer (BE)

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Intermediate Backend | Senior Backend | Staff Backend | Dev Framework | Development Framework | Engineering Framework

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Dev Senior Backend Engineers at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Leadership Competencies
• Technical Competencies
• Values Alignment

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Senior Leadership Competencies

Engineering

• Communicates clearly and effectively, both written and verbally, when advising, setting expectations, or suggesting improvements. This applies whether interacting with team members, customers, or the wider community.
• Able to deliver work, even when given unclear requirements, within the context of their team.
• Demonstrates knowledge about how their group and stage fit into the larger business.
• Able to suggest alternative solutions to customer problems based on what they know about other areas of GitLab.
• Looks for opportunities for process improvements within their team and works with others to implement process changes.

<%# ##### Development %> <%# No differences between engineering and Development senior leadership competencies %>

• Leads technical architecture discussions and help drive technical decisions
• Performs Code Reviews across multiple stages on a regular cadence
• Participates on Working Groups as the need arises

Senior Technical Competencies

Engineering

• Contributes to the team’s understanding of quality and how it impacts the team’s domain with respect to their role.
• Able to take on large issues with vague requirements.
• Able to resolve complex challenges.
• Acts as a Coach and Mentor to others.

Development

• Improves the state of our test framework and any other dependencies.
• Coaches others on improving their tests.
• Always looks to improve our test coverage with every MR coded or reviewed.
• Ensures security best practices are followed across many domains and escalate security risks
• Able to take on large issues with vague requirements and design an implementation.
• Implements the GitLab Iteration value when faced with an issue that grows in size or complexity by converting the issue into an Epic or breaking it down into smaller issues.
• Helps to set and enforce coding standards.
• Looks to maintain coding consistency across the code base.
• Provides reviews across many domains and be mindful of how changes may impact other teams.
• Improves the engineering projects at GitLab as a project maintainer. For more information regarding timelines and exceptions, see this page.
• Able to resolve complex performance issues.
• Mentors others on best practices.
• Understands how code in their domain performs in production on GitLab.com.
• Understands impact of the architecture and dependencies required for the self-managed product.
• Act as coach for open source contributors.

• Able to work with 3rd party services regardless of the quality of the documentation
• Identifies slow and inefficient code produced by team members
• Provides high level of expertise in server side programming languages and their frameworks
• Understands the DB constraints, relational vs non-relational, and potential limitations
• Able to debug production issues across services and multiple levels of the technical stack
• Develops the architecture by extending existing features

Senior Values Alignment

GitLab

• Adhere to the Collaboration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Results Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Efficiency Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Iteration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Transparency Competencies for this job grade.

Development

• Engages with the stable-counterparts for their team looking at how to improve the working relationships and processes.
• Represents their team, and considers the impact to the team, when in conversations with others.
• Provides feedback that focuses on the business impact of the behaviour.
• Extensive user of GitLab (dogfooding) and regularly makes helpful suggestions for feature proposals in a variety of stages.
• Demonstrates ownership of projects that require collaboration with other teams.
• Leads conversations towards action and encourages bias for action to deliver results.
• Helps others in their group to achieve their group’s goals.
• Follows up on suggestions that they make and issues that they create.
• Seeks out ways to be more effective in their role, while also starting to mentor others in ways to work efficiently.
• Proactively takes on work that enables greater efficiency of others in the team.
• Seeks out diverse opinions to improve the quality of the team’s work, for example through code review from outside the team.
• Uses people’s talents to maximize the results of their group.
• Independently balances short term gains and long term benefit.
• Creates proposals for the team that have a wide scope but still contain an iterative proposal for delivering the outcome.
• Identifies opportunities to improve the processes around iteration.
• Holds their team to a high standard of transparency and encourages others to work in the open.
• Directly or indirectly takes part in the hiring process to help ensure that we bring in a wide variety of experience into our teams.