Staff Backend Engineer Secrets

### Role Overview You will join the Software Supply Chain Security stage, providing technical leadership for GitLab's strategic investment in integrated secrets management. You will set the technical direction for GitLab Secrets Manager, our OpenBao-powered solution that helps customers securely store, distribute, and manage the lifecycle of secrets used across CI/CD pipelines. This role sits at the intersection of the GitLab platform and the OpenBao open source project: you'll drive architecture decisions for multi-tenant secrets management at scale, guide integration into GitLab, and contribute upstream to deliver trusted capabilities. ### What You'll Do - Lead the technical strategy for GitLab Secrets Manager, setting architecture direction for secure, multi-tenant secrets management at scale. - Own the integration between GitLab and OpenBao, including namespaces, authentication mechanisms, and policy management. - Collaborate with Pipeline Security, Authentication, and Platform teams to propose, review, and deliver cross-team secrets management improvements. - Partner with GitLab.com Infrastructure teams to ensure secrets management meets reliability, performance, and operational requirements. - Represent GitLab in the OpenBao open source project by contributing features upstream, participating in technical steering discussions, and maintaining technical credibility. - Mentor and advise engineers on secrets management, cryptographic systems, and secure architecture patterns. - Interface with engineering managers and senior leadership to scope initiatives, clarify tradeoffs, and unblock delivery. - Engage with customers and external stakeholders to communicate capabilities and roadmap direction. ### Requirements - Experience designing and operating secrets management systems (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao, or cloud-native offerings), including secure storage, access control, and audit logging. - Ability to lead architecture decisions for resilient, multi-tenant services that handle secrets operations at scale, including high availability and cluster management patterns. - Working knowledge of cryptographic and key management concepts, such as encryption in transit and at rest, key derivation, and hardware security module (HSM) or PKCS#11 integrations. - Experience implementing authentication and authorization integrations, such as JSON Web Token (JWT) or OpenID Connect (OIDC), mutual TLS (mTLS), and certificate-based authentication. - Proficiency building product integrations in Go (within the OpenBao or Vault ecosystem) and Ruby on Rails for GitLab platform integration. - Experience contributing to open source projects and working effectively with distributed governance. - Demonstrated ability to operate with high autonomy, drive strategy, and serve as a trusted partner to senior leaders. - Strong communication and collaboration skills to influence across teams and levels in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.