Senior Backend Engineer (RoR), AST: Secret Detection

An overview of this role

As a Backend Engineer on the Secret Detection team, you'll help protect sensitive data by building the services, scanning workflows, and remediation paths that prevent leaked secrets from reaching production. Your work will contribute to the full secret management lifecycle, from push protection to pipeline-based scanning, validation, and auditability, so developers can move quickly without taking on avoidable security risk. This is a strong opportunity if you want to work on security features with clear customer impact, improve detection quality, and help teams act when credentials, API keys, or other secrets are exposed.

You'll focus on backend systems that power Secret Detection across GitLab's DevSecOps platform, working closely with product management and engineering peers in an async-first environment. In your first year, you'll contribute to core product capabilities, improve performance and result quality, and help shape technical direction through code reviews, RFCs, and proof of concepts.

Some examples of our projects:

• Prevent secret leaks in source code with GitLab Secret Push Protection
• Verify validity of secret detection findings

What you’ll do

• Guide the design and implementation of backend features for GitLab Secret Detection in Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, and Go, delivering capabilities that improve coverage, reliability, or response time for secret detection workflows.
• Build clean, well-tested, maintainable code that meets GitLab standards for reliability and performance, helping reduce regressions and maintain backend systems at scale.
• Partner with product management and engineering peers to deliver backend capabilities that improve detection, validation, remediation, and audit trail coverage across the secret management lifecycle.
• Improve detection quality by reducing false positives, strengthening secret validation workflows, and enabling faster, more effective remediation paths.
• Contribute to code reviews, RFCs, and proof-of-concept work that guide technical approaches across the Secret Detection category.
• Identify technical debt and operational inefficiencies, then propose and implement practical improvements.
• Diagnose performance and opti