Intermediate Backend Engineer, Authorization

An overview of this role

As a Software Engineer on GitLab's Authorization team, you'll help build and maintain the system that decides what every user, token, and automated agent can access on GitLab.com, Self-Managed, and Dedicated. You'll work alongside experienced engineers who guide the larger design decisions, delivering well-scoped changes and growing into ownership of larger parts of the system.

Today, that work is Ruby on Rails. Roughly 400 policy classes and a catalog of about 1,900 permissions sit behind every application programming interface (API) request. You'll work on fine-grained token permissions, custom roles, and the GraphQL and representational state transfer (REST) APIs that enforce them. A single request can trigger hundreds of permission checks, so correctness and performance both matter.

You'll also contribute to moving the permission model to a new authorization stack that pairs the Rails monolith with a Rust policy engine. The engine represents access relationships and evaluates permission rules, and can run within the monolith's process or be reached through remote procedure calls using gRPC. You don't need prior Rust experience: several engineers on the team learned it for this work, and we'll support you doing the same.