Staff Backend Engineer, AST: Composition Analysis

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 Engineer on GitLab's Software Composition Analysis team, you'll drive hands-on implementation of security features that help customers understand and manage risks in their software supply chain. Your focus will be on enhancing GitLab's SCA capabilities in dependency scanning and container scanning. You'll work directly on architecture and technical implementation and help the team push forward on three core goals: Gather (introducing data points that help customers understand the urgency of issues, like reachability analysis and supply chain poisoning detection), Integrate (providing other teams with innovative collection techniques for better workflows), and Optimize (solving data correlation at massive scale). You'll contribute hands-on code, help solve novel technical challenges, and establish patterns that improve how the distributed team works together across multiple time zones.

Examples of some future features that you may help build: - Dependency scanning for unmanaged C/C++ - Dependency Scanning for Yocto environments - Vulnerability detection using CPE-based matching against package metadata

What you’ll do

Implement complex features in dependency scanning and container scanning, shipping improvements that increase scan coverage, improve accuracy, and drive adoption of GitLab's SCA capabilities

Solve novel technical problems in SCA, establishing reusable patterns that reduce delivery time and improve engineering effectiveness across the team

Guide architectural and implementation decisions in collaboration with engineering managers, product managers, and peer engineers to improve scalability, reliability, and delivery outcomes across the team's SCA architecture

Contribute code, design reviews, and technical mentorship that raise quality standards, improve maintainability, and strengthen performance across the codebase

Collaborate across GitLab's security domain to align SCA work with related efforts in vulnerability management and adjacent product areas, accelerating delivery of shared roadmap goals and improving coordination across related security efforts

Identify and resolve technical debt, prioritizing changes that improve team velocity, code health, and long-term maintainability across the team's core SCA services

Translate product needs and customer feedback into technical solutions in partnership with product, UX, and security stakeholders, delivering features that address high-impact customer risks and advance shared roadmap goals

What you’ll bring

Hands-on experience in Software Composition Analysis and the ability to contrib