Intermediate Backend Engineer, Verify: Runner Core

An overview of this role

As an Intermediate Backend Engineer on our Verify: Runner Core group within the Verify: Runner organization, you'll help build and evolve GitLab Runner, the interface between GitLab and our customers' CI infrastructure. Whether jobs run on Kubernetes clusters, cloud VMs, or on-premises hardware, GitLab Runner makes it happen. Each week, Runners process millions of jobs for GitLab.com, and our container images are downloaded hundreds of millions of times.

You'll collaborate on technical initiatives and contribute to design and implementation, taking on work that matches your experience while growing your impact over time. You'll learn from how customers use our CI/CD capabilities and use that insight to help the team solve real-world scaling and reliability challenges. This input can come from bug reports, customer escalations, or feedback on executor behavior and performance. GitLab Runner users often have demanding CI/CD requirements, and many rely on the infrastructure you help build as a mission-critical part of their software delivery workflows.

Here's a glimpse of some of the things we're working on and where we're headed:

• Job Routing: Transforming GitLab Runner's job scheduling from HTTP polling to intelligent, server-mediated routing that enables runner prioritization, admission control, and distributed autoscaling coordination.
• We've already kicked this off with Admission Control, and you could contribute to its iteration.
• Externalizing CI: Transforming GitLab CI from static YAML configuration to dynamic, programmable pipelines where jobs can create other jobs at runtime.
• Job Volume Mounts: Enabling CI jobs to mount GitLab repositories and artifacts as filesystem volumes, providing instant, lightweight access to multi-repository content without full git clones.

What you'll do

• Design and develop features and improvements for GitLab Runner that are secure, well-tested, and high-performance, with a focus on strong architecture in Go services, appropriate for an intermediate-level engineer.
• Partner with the Product Manager and other Senior Engineers to assess the technical feasibility and scope of Runner-related feature requests, contributing your perspective and asking clarifying questions.
• Contribute to architectural decisions that modernize Runner's technology stack, favoring sol