Senior Fullstack Engineer, Authorization

About the Role

As a Senior Full Stack Engineer on the Authorization team, you will build critical systems that determine who can access what across the entire GitLab platform, impacting millions of users from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. This role focuses on architecting and implementing GitLab's next-generation Authorization infrastructure, including policy-as-code systems, fine-grained permissions, and performance optimization at massive scale.

Responsibilities

• Implement fine-grained permission systems for Job Tokens, Personal Access Tokens, Duo agent platform, and other authentication mechanisms.
• Collaborate with Security, Database, and Platform teams on new authorization stack initiatives.
• Solve complex performance challenges, including authorization query optimization, caching strategies, and database decomposition.
• Design authorization systems that work seamlessly across multiple deployment models and multi-tenant architectures.
• Advocate for improvements in authorization security, maintainability, and developer experience through code review and technical leadership.
• Contribute to architectural decisions for authorization features with a strategic, long-term view.
• Mentor team members on authorization patterns, policy languages, and secure coding practices.

Requirements

• Significant professional experience with Ruby on Rails and Vue.js in production environments.
• Strong understanding of authorization concepts, including RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control), and fine-grained access control patterns.
• Experience with high-scale backend systems that handle millions of requests per day.
• Deep knowledge of database optimization, particularly PostgreSQL performance tuning and query optimization.
• Familiarity with policy-based authorization systems (e.g., Cedar, Rego) or a strong interest in learning them.
• Understanding of security principles, including threat modeling, least-privilege access, and zero-trust architectures.
• Experience with distributed systems, caching strategies, and service-to-service communication.
• Proven ability to own complex technical initiatives from design through production deployment.
• Strong collaboration skills for working across multiple engineering teams in an asynchronous, remote environment.
• Comfort working in a highly agile, iterative development process with a focus on shipping value incrementally.

About the Team

The Authorization team is responsible for building and maintaining GitLab's permission systems to be more secure, scalable, and flexible. The team is currently executing a major authorization systems redesign that will fundamentally transform how authorization works across GitLab. You will work closely with Authentication & Product Security, Database, and Security teams for integrated identity and access management, query optimization, data model design, and security architecture reviews.