Staff Backend Engineer, Knowledge Graph (Rust)

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. An overview of this role: As a Staff Backend Engineer on the GitLab Knowledge Graph team, you'll help design, scale, and operate a high‑impact graph data service that underpins agents, analytics, and architecture‑level features across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self‑Managed deployments. You'll partner with a small, senior Rust‑first team to ship reliable graph capabilities and make them easy for other teams and agents to use. The Knowledge Graph service is a distributed SDLC indexing system. It builds a property graph from GitLab SDLC (software development lifecycle) and code data using ClickHouse, NATS JetStream, and the Data Insights Platform. It also exposes secure graph queries and MCP tools for AI agents and product features. In this role, you’ll own core parts of the system end to end: shaping the architecture, hardening multi‑tenant behavior and performance, and making it straightforward for other teams and agents to consume graph capabilities. In your first year, you’ll take clear ownership of major areas of the service (for example, the graph query engine, SDLC indexing, or multi‑tenant authorization), reduce single points of failure through better runbooks and shared context, and raise the bar on how we design, build, and operate analytical services across the stack. What you’ll do Lead the design and evolution of core Knowledge Graph services in a production Rust codebase, including the graph query engine, SDLC and code indexing pipelines, and API/MCP surfaces that other GitLab teams and AI agents rely on. Own complex, cross-cutting initiatives that span GitLab Rails, the Data Insights Platform (Siphon, NATS, ClickHouse), and GitLab Duo Agent Platform, from technical direction and design docs through implementation, rollout, and iteration. Drive system design decisions that improve reliability, scalability, and maintainability for analytical (OLAP‑style) graph workloads. This includes multi‑hop traversals, aggregations, and multi‑tenant isolation. Document trade‑offs so the broader team can move quickly and stay aligned. Define and improve operational maturity for the service, including service level objectives (SLOs), observability, runbooks, incident response, capacity planning, and production readiness (PREP) for GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments. Collaborate asynchronously with product, data, infrastructure, security, and AI teams to sequence work, unblock platform‑level dependencies, and land features in a way that is safe for customers and sustainable for the team. Apply AI‑assisted development workflows responsibly (for example, using MCP‑awar ... (truncated, view full listing at source)