About the company
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.
Responsibilities
- Design and ship authorization changes in GitLab's Ruby on Rails monolith, where a single request can trigger hundreds of permission checks.
- Own a workstream end to end. Problem definition through feature-flagged rollout, dual-run verification, and cleanup.
- Build and extend fine-grained permissions for tokens and roles, and keep the permission catalog coherent as it grows.
- Extend and harden authorization enforcement across GraphQL and the REST API.
- Refactor long-lived policy code so both the monolith and our new authorization engine can evaluate it, without changing behavior for existing customers.
- Improve the reliability, performance, and security posture of existing authorization systems, including paying down permission-model debt.
- Partner with the authentication, platform, AI, and modular-service teams on interface contracts as authorization moves toward a shared service.
- Drive technical decisions in writing. Design docs, architecture decision records, and code review, in a fully asynchronous organization.
Requirements
- Significant experience building and operating production Ruby on Rails applications.
- Experience designing or implementing authorization systems, including role-based access control and fine-grained permissions.
- A security mindset. You treat a permission bug as a security bug, and you reason about blast radius before elegance.
- Comfort making careful changes to large, long-lived codebases. Incremental refactors, feature-flagged rollouts, and migrations that must not change behavior for existing users.
- Working knowledge of GraphQL and API authorization patterns.
- Attention to performance at scale. You understand why one uncached check matters when it runs hundreds of times per request.
- Strong written communication. You are effective when most decisions happen in a document or a merge request rather than a meeting.
Conditions
- The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only.