An overview of this role

GitLab is seeking a Principal Engineer to set technical direction for our most critical infrastructure platforms. This role operates at organizational scale, owning architecture, solving complex systems problems, and driving initiatives that shape how GitLab grows, performs, and remains reliable.

As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a technical authority and force multiplier, leading architectural decisions across distributed and cloud-native systems to translate business strategy into durable technical direction. Spanning multiple teams and domains, you will bring clarity to ambiguity, raise engineering standards, and mentor senior talent while remaining accountable for real production outcomes. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for leaders who drive success through influence and shape the foundational platforms that the entire organization depends on.

Organizational Focus Areas

Principal Engineers at GitLab drive strategy across our most critical infrastructure and delivery groups. Role placement across the following tracks is determined by business need and organizational priority.

Group Tenant Scale (GTS)

This track builds GitLab’s next generation, multi-tenant, horizontally scalable, and resilient SaaS platform. You will architect the foundations that enable other engineering teams to build upon this platform and drive convergence among GitLab’s various platforms..

• Core Focus: Lead the design and evolution of projects that enable our distributed, multi-tenant SaaS transformation, including Cells, Organizations, and OrgMover.
• Distributed Architecture: Architect for zero downtime, transparent relocation, and application hardening in a massive distributed environment.
• Strategic Decisions: Guide architecture decisions with availability, reliability, resiliency, performance, and cost in mind.

GitLab Delivery 

The GitLab Delivery track focuses on enhancing the reliability, efficiency, and speed of GitLab’s end-to-end software delivery across all platforms and offerings.

• Core Focus: Lead the platform strategy spanning Developer Experience, CI infrastructure, packaging, and release delivery across SaaS, Self-Managed, and Dedicated.
• Developer Experience: Treat GitLab engineers as customers, building self-service tooling, testing infrastructure, and paved paths that increase velocity while maintaining quality.
• Delivery at Scale: Architect reliable, automated pipelines that streamline how GitLab is packaged, released, and deployed across all platforms and offerings.

What You'll Do

• Own and drive the architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms that support GitLab at global scale.
• Lead the design and evolution of large platforms and distributed systems that are scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-efficient.
• Serve as the technical authority on complex initiatives, guiding decisions that impact multiple teams and product areas.
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans.
• Drive alignment across engineering, product, and leadership by clearly communicating tradeoffs and recommendations.
• Establish technical standards and architectural patterns that raise quality and consistency across the organization.
• Be accountable for production outcomes, including reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a force multiplier through influence rather than direct authority.
• Operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces where both the problem and the solution need to be defined.

What You'll Bring

• Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale platforms or distributed systems in cloud-native environments.
• Strong proficiency in Golang and/or Ruby, with the ability to contribute to, review, and guide core architectural changes in production codebases.
• Strong architectural judgment, including the ability to balance scalability, reliability, performance, security, and cost.
• Experience owning platform-level technical decisions that impacted multiple teams or an entire engineering domain.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes-based environments as a production platform, including how they influence system design, deployment models, reliability, and operational complexity.
• Experience being accountable for production systems, not just design recommendations.
• Ability to author and drive long-term technical strategy and multi-month roadmaps.
• Track record of leading through influence and shaping technical direction without direct authority.
• Comfort making high-impact technical decisions, including build vs buy vs partner tradeoffs.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.

About the team

The Principal Engineer role sits within GitLab’s Infrastructure Platforms organization, working across multiple teams to shape how our platform scales and operates. This group is responsible for some of GitLab’s most critical systems, including the multi-tenant SaaS platform, core delivery pipelines, and the underlying infrastructure that powers millions of users. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll define technical direction, guide architectural decisions, and ensure our platforms remain resilient, performant, and modern. The team operates fully remotely and collaborates asynchronously across time zones, grounded in GitLab’s values of transparency, autonomy, and open communication. You’ll help the organization tackle complex distributed systems challenges at scale while mentoring other engineers and building a culture focused on reliability, efficiency, and continuous improvement.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Tenant Scale: Git team, you'll help improve one of the most widely used foundations of modern software development. Git is at the core of how developers collaborate, and this role focuses on making Git and Gitaly more capable, reliable, and efficient for GitLab and the people who use our platform. You'll contribute directly to upstream Git, help shape technical direction, and connect open source community discussions with GitLab product needs.

Reporting to the Git team lead, you'll work across Git and Gitaly to deliver changes that improve repository access, performance, and long-term maintainability. This is a unique opportunity to influence both an essential open source project and the systems GitLab uses to serve repositories at scale, while helping guide larger efforts that affect the future direction of Git.

• Some examples of our projects: contributing new features and fixes to upstream Git, and adapting Gitaly to make effective use of new and existing Git capabilities

What you’ll do

• Participate in architectural discussions and technical decisions related to Git and Gitaly, helping drive implementation choices that improve correctness, performance, and maintainability.
• Contribute features, bug fixes, and performance improvements to upstream Git in line with team and community goals, delivering changes that improve repository access and reliability for users.
• Adapt Gitaly to make effective use of Git capabilities, including integrating newly available features to improve scalability, efficiency, and long-term maintainability.
• Connect discussions in the open source Git project with GitLab's product direction and engineering work, helping align upstream contributions with product and platform needs.
• Scope tasks, estimate effort, and describe implementation plans that support the team's priorities and enable predictable delivery of technical work.
• Test and validate the features you build and integrate, with a focus on correctness and reliability to reduce regressions and support stable production use.
• Collaborate with team members, contributors and the Git ecosystem
• Represent GitLab as a constructive participant in the open source ecosystem, building productive relationships that support ongoing collaboration with the Git community.

What you’ll bring

• Experience building instrumented, observable software systems.
• Knowledge of Git internals, including its code and data structures, or practical experience operating Git servers.
• Experience writing and testing production-quality code in C.
• Experience contributing to open source projects, including Git or similar systems, and working effectively in public collaboration spaces.
• Familiarity with Go for backend development and understanding of Linux internals such as processes, memory management, input/output, and filesystems.
• Interest or experience in large-scale or distributed systems, storage formats, graph theory, or highly available production environments, including transferable backend or infrastructure experience.

About the team

The Tenant Scale: Git team works on the Git capabilities that underpin repository access in GitLab, with a strong connection to Gitaly and the upstream Git project. The team contributes directly to open source Git, improves how GitLab uses Git in production, and helps shape technical direction in areas such as performance, correctness, and maintainability. Team members collaborate asynchronously across regions, balancing internal engineering needs with active participation in public open source discussions. For more on the domain this role supports, see the Team Direction Page.

An overview of this role

As the Engineering Manager, GitLab Delivery - Operate, you’ll guide a globally distributed team focused on making it easier for customers to deploy, upgrade, and run GitLab reliably in their own infrastructure. You’ll help shape the systems and tooling that support environments ranging from single-node virtual machines to large Kubernetes clusters, with a focus on reliability, operational simplicity, upgrade velocity, and zero-downtime capabilities across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed deployments. In this role, you’ll partner closely with a Product Manager and work across Infrastructure Platforms to connect customer needs and business goals with practical engineering choices.

This is a hands-on leadership opportunity for someone who wants to support a high-performing team while influencing how GitLab is delivered at scale. In your first year, you’ll help the team deliver better deployment and upgrade experiences, guide technical direction in areas like Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and cloud-native deployment architectures, and contribute to incident management to help support the availability of GitLab.com.

What you’ll do

• Guide a globally distributed engineering team and create an environment where team members can do strong work and grow in an all-remote, asynchronous setting.
• Hire onboard, and develop team members who align with GitLab’s values and contribute to an outcome-focused engineering organization.
• Manage and improve agile, asynchronous workflows so the team can deliver deployment tooling and services iteratively and reliably.
• Partner with Product Management and engineering peers across Infrastructure Platforms to align team priorities with customer needs and business goals.
• Own the reliability, upgrade experience, and operational simplicity of GitLab deployments across self-managed environments, GitLab.com, and GitLab Dedicated.
• Improve deployment patterns, observability, zero-downtime capabilities, and upgrade orchestration for customers running GitLab on their own infrastructure.
• Apply technical judgment in areas such as Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and stateful application delivery to guide choices and unblock the team.
• Participate in incident management and work with reliability and development teams to help maintain the availability of GitLab.com.

What you’ll bring

• Experience guiding deployment tooling, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering teams that operate at meaningful scale.
• Strong technical knowledge of Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts for stateful applications, and upgrade orchestration patterns.
• Familiarity with cloud-native deployment architectures, database lifecycle management, schema migrations, and zero-downtime upgrade strategies.
• Experience working on enterprise-scale or consumer-scale platforms, ideally in a product-focused software environment.
• Ability to investigate complex deployment and operational issues and explain tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience building high-performing, distributed teams and supporting team members in an asynchronous, all-remote environment.
• Effective cross-functional skills across functions such as Infrastructure, Support, and Customer Success to improve customer outcomes.
• Openness to diverse paths into the role, including transferable skills, formal computer science education, or equivalent practical experience, along with interest in open source and developer tools.

About the team

The GitLab Delivery - Operate team is part of the Infrastructure Platforms department, which enables how GitLab operates, scales, and is delivered across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed offerings. We are a globally distributed team that owns deployment tooling and operational patterns to help customers run GitLab reliably on infrastructure ranging from virtual machines to Kubernetes clusters. We work asynchronously across regions and work closely with other Infrastructure teams, along with Support and Customer Success, to turn lessons from operating GitLab at scale into product and tooling improvements that benefit customers across all deployment models.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer, Cells Infrastructure, you'll help us build the foundation that lets GitLab.com scale horizontally through our Cells architecture. You'll work on two core parts of that system: edge routing services that direct traffic across a fleet of independent Cell clusters, and the Topology Service that manages and serves cluster topology information as the source of truth for the rest of the platform. Your work will make routing reliable and low-latency across protocols, and ensure GitLab teams can build Cell-aware features with confidence as we grow.

Some examples of our projects:

• Building and operating routing services in TypeScript that direct requests to the correct Cell using cluster topology data
• Developing and maintaining the systems that store, update, and serve cluster topology information that routing, resource assignment, and Cell lifecycle decisions depend on

What you'll do

• Design and implement edge traffic routing that directs requests to the correct Cell in a way that's transparent to users.
• Build and evolve the Topology Service that serves as the authoritative source of cluster state for routing, resource assignment, and Cell lifecycle decisions.
• Collaborate across the GitLab Rails monolith and supporting services to make features and data models Cell-aware with feature teams across the product.
• Operate and improve the routing and topology systems you build by participating in tier-2 on-call, responding to escalated incidents, and strengthening observability and operational tooling.
• Author Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), operational runbooks, and documentation so other teams can understand, adopt, and extend the Cells platform.
• Review merge requests from GitLab team members and community contributors, maintaining high standards for correctness, performance, and security across the stack.

What you'll bring

• Experience building observable, resilient production services using Golang or Ruby on Rails (TypeScript experience is a plus).
• Background delivering and operating production systems in high-scale environments, including incident response and operational ownership.
• Ability to reason about distributed systems, including consistency models, partitioning strategies, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience building high-throughput networking services (gRPC and protocol buffers knowledge is a plus).
• Familiarity working in large, multi-team codebases and coordinating changes across teams and services, including making features and data models Cell-aware.
• Knowledge of observability practices such as metrics, tracing, and alerting, with an approach focused on building systems you'd be confident operating on-call.
• Strong written communication skills for an async-first, globally distributed team, including documenting decisions (for example, architecture decision records) and runbooks.
• Experience working with relational databases in production, including schema design, migrations, and query performance tuning (PostgreSQL experience is a plus).

About the team

We're the Cells Infrastructure team within the Tenant Scale group in Infrastructure Platforms. We're a globally distributed, all-remote group of Backend Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers working asynchronously across multiple time zones. We own foundational services for GitLab's Cells architecture, including edge routing that directs requests to the right Cell and our topology systems that act as the source of truth for cluster state. Our challenge is making GitLab.com scale horizontally in a way that's reliable, low-latency, and operable, so every request reaches the right cluster and we can keep growing safely. For more on how we work, see Tenant Scale Group Handbook Page.

As a Staff Backend Engineer in the Developer Experience group, you’ll work cross-functionally to help us identify and improve the engineering experience across GitLab’s internal engineering teams. We’re at a pivotal time in transforming our testing approach and development experience to enable engineers to deliver high-quality code efficiently and with confidence. 

Developer Experience currently has six, globally distributed teams of Backend Engineers and Software Engineers in Test. This role will work across the entire group to help us identify and remove the biggest points of friction that affect development at GitLab. Expect to split your time between hands-on coding in Ruby and Go, designing scalable solutions and helping every team deliver.  You’ll be instrumental in shaping our engineering culture across GitLab.  

This is a highly visible role with strong company-wide support. You’ll be instrumental in shifting our culture and practices toward a cohesive Developer Experience Platform strategy—backed by buy-in and appetite for change.

Some examples of our projects

• Identifying and removing the source of flakiness in our tests pipelines
• Introducing comprehensive test coverage reporting to guide our decisions about what and when to test
• Standardizing logging libraries and documentation to make it easy for all features and components to provide consistent logs
• Providing stable, configurable development environments 

What You’ll Do

• Drive Technical Excellence Across Teams: Provide hands-on engineering contributions and technical leadership across six Developer Experience teams, jumping in to unblock critical work or accelerate high-impact initiatives
• Champion Engineering Needs: Partner with engineering teams across GitLab to identify pain points, gather feedback, and translate day-to-day frustrations into actionable improvements for the Developer Experience roadmap
• Transform Testing at Scale: Help us modernize our testing to support GitLab's growth—ensuring engineers have fast, reliable tools that catch issues early without slowing them down
• Optimize CI/CD Pipelines: Reduce merge and CI friction by building workflows that deliver fast, actionable feedback—helping engineers iterate confidently and ship faster
• Break Down Systemic Bottlenecks: Collaborate with Platform, Product, and Infrastructure teams to identify and eliminate the architectural and process friction that slows down development
• Shape Engineering Culture: Foster a culture of continuous learning, inclusion, and improvement—where great developer experience is a shared value across the organization

What You’ll Bring

• Deep experience with developer tooling, DevEx strategies, and testing frameworks at scale
• Experience leading platform or transformation initiatives across multiple teams
• Proven ability to influence without authority and collaborate across functions
• Familiarity with DevOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in a remote-first environment
• A product mindset with a passion for empowering developers
• Alignment with GitLab values, especially collaboration, iteration, and transparency

An overview of this role

You'll join the Dedicated team as a Site Reliability Engineer focused on Environment Automation, where your work will help power hundreds of isolated GitLab environments for our customers. In this role, you'll help keep these environments reliable, scalable, secure, and consistent by treating everything as code and contributing to automation across the entire lifecycle, from initial provisioning to day-to-day operations. Instead of operating a single platform, you'll collaborate with senior SREs to solve the unique challenges of managing many tenant environments in parallel, each with its own constraints and integration points.

You'll help define, deploy, and maintain GitLab environments across cloud providers using infrastructure as code, deployment packages, and Kubernetes. You'll contribute to automation that reduces manual work, assist in building tooling that orchestrates upgrades and configuration changes safely at scale, and support an observability stack that lets us understand and improve the health of every environment. Your work will directly impact how customers experience GitLab Dedicated and other managed offerings, enabling them to focus on building software while we ensure their GitLab environments are always production ready.

Some examples of work you'll do:

• Contribute to the design and evolution of infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes to provision, upgrade, and operate many GitLab environments with minimal manual effort
• Help debug and resolve production issues across Kubernetes clusters, GitLab components, and cloud services, then assist in building automation and safeguards that prevent similar issues from recurring
• Assist in creating and maintaining deployment and orchestration tools, such as Helm Charts, omnibus-gitlab configurations, and multi-tenant workflows, that make it easy for teams to manage GitLab environments at scale

What you'll do

• Contribute to automating operational tasks across many GitLab environments, from initial provisioning and configuration updates to upgrades and routine maintenance, helping reduce manual work and improve reliability at scale under the guidance of senior team members.
• Help build and refine the observability stack for multi-tenant GitLab environments so we monitor the right signals across Kubernetes, cloud services, and GitLab applications, supporting early issue detection and basic capacity tracking.
• Assist in responding to platform alerts and incidents, collaborating with Environment Automation SREs and engineering teams to troubleshoot production issues across multiple tenants and document findings.
• Support planning and implementation of infrastructure changes, capacity expansions, and new service rollouts for Dedicated and other managed GitLab environments, contributing to efforts that improve resource efficiency and environment isolation.
• Develop and maintain scripts, automation tools, and infrastructure-as-code workflows that manage parts of the GitLab environment lifecycle, enabling more repeatable, self-service operations over time.
• Apply and help implement best practices for running GitLab on Kubernetes and cloud platforms, focusing on day-to-day reliability, performance, and security while learning how to keep environments consistent.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for production GitLab environments with appropriate support, helping triage and mitigate incidents across clusters and cloud providers and contributing to post-incident reviews.
• Document operational tasks, runbooks, and lessons learned so they become clear, repeatable processes and can be candidates for future automation, improving shared knowledge and reducing manual toil across the team.

What you'll bring

• Experience working as an SRE or in a similar role operating production infrastructure, with an interest in automating the lifecycle of many environments or tenants in parallel, even if you have not yet done so at large scale.
• Hands-on experience with Golang (required) and the ability to read, understand, and modify infrastructure tools written in Go.
• Hands-on experience running Kubernetes-based workloads in production, including basic understanding of deployments, rollouts, and debugging common issues like crash loops, failed health checks, and scheduling problems.
• Familiarity with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools such as Terraform and Ansible, including experience working with modules, variables, and managing state safely for multiple environments.
• Solid understanding of Git-based workflows and infrastructure-as-code practices, with the ability to contribute to reusable modules, templates, and pipelines that make automation safer and more consistent.
• Experience working in distributed systems or cloud-based production environments, ideally in SaaS or managed service settings, with comfort participating in incident response and on-call rotations under guidance from more senior team members.
• A proactive mindset focused on automation and documentation—you look for opportunities to remove manual steps, improve runbooks, and turn repetitive tasks into reliable, self-service tools.
• Comfort working asynchronously across distributed teams and a desire to contribute to GitLab's values of collaboration, transparency, and iteration.

About the team

We are responsible for building, running, and evolving the entire lifecycle of the GitLab environments that power the GitLab Dedicated platform. You'll be part of our team focused on owning the reliability, scalability, performance, and security of automated single-tenant GitLab instances and their supporting services. GitLab Dedicated provides fully managed, isolated environments for customers around the world, which means your work directly impacts how organizations of all sizes run their mission-critical software delivery on GitLab. We operate in a fully distributed, asynchronous environment across multiple regions, collaborating on everything from infrastructure automation and environment lifecycle design to incident response and capacity planning. You'll be solving novel challenges at scale, from orchestrating infrastructure-as-code workflows across hundreds of tenants to designing the automation that keeps those environments consistent, secure, and up to date. We continuously seek to reduce complexity and improve efficiency by leveraging cloud vendor managed products and services where appropriate, ensuring GitLab Dedicated remains a best-in-class managed platform for our customers. For more on how we operate, see the relevant GitLab Dedicated and infrastructure handbook pages.

An overview of this role

As an Engineering Manager at GitLab, you see your team as your most valuable product. Your primary focus is on the people you lead—guiding them, nurturing their growth, and ensuring they have everything they need to succeed. While you're technically credible and understand the details of the work being done, your role is about empowering a world-class engineering team, fostering their health, and driving delivery on product commitments.

In this role, you will lead the Tenant Services, Geo team. Geo is a feature that replicates data from a GitLab instance to a warm-standby, used as a solution in data migrations and for disaster recovery. The Tenant Services Geo team will be responsible for supporting GitLab Dedicated customer migrations and Geo-related escalations across GitLab.com’s Dedicated offering, excluding FedRAMP environments. The team’s mandate spans the full Geo operational surface—pre- and post-cutover data hygiene, migration execution, and non-migration Geo escalations—working closely with the core Geo team, Dedicated migrations, and Support. The team will also contribute small fixes and improvements to Geo.

Challenges in this role include growing top-tier SRE talent in India, coordinating a shift and weekend coverage model for high-risk cutovers,, and ensuring high-quality execution of migrations that carry significant customer data and reputational risk. You’ll work closely with engineering leadership, the core Geo team, Dedicated migrations, Support, and backend/SRE engineers across Infrastructure.

Some examples of our focus areas:

• Standing up the Tenant Services, Geo shift model and rotation for Dedicated cutovers across EMEA and US hours.
• Evolving a retryable, low-risk cutover model for Dedicated migrations, in partnership with core Geo and Dedicated leadership.
• Reducing cutover duration to unlock more weekday migrations and improve team sustainability.
• Driving operational metrics like escalation absorption, internal escalation rate, cutover coverage, and response times.

What you’ll do

• Hire and manage a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers in India that lives our values.
• Hold regular 1:1s with all members of your team, providing coaching and regular feedback around the individual’s performance.
• Coordinate and continuously refine the team’s shift and weekend coverage model for Dedicated migrations.
• Own operational execution of Dedicated Geo migrations and cutovers, including planning, pre-cutover preparation, live execution, and post-cutover validation and cleanup.
• Ensure the team provides high-quality, timely responses to Geo-related escalations from Support and internal partners.
• Foster technical decision making on the team, stepping in to make final decisions when necessary—especially during high-stakes migrations or incidents.
• Build and maintain runbooks, guardrails, and post-cutover reviews so the team operates with rigor rather than improvisation, especially during ramp-up.
• Collaborate with core Geo, Dedicated migrations, and other Infrastructure teams to identify and prioritize engineering investments that improve migration tooling and processes.
• Define, track, and report on key operational metrics such as escalation volume absorbed, internal escalation rate, cutover coverage, response times, and team health signals, using them to drive continuous improvement.
• Participate in the Incident Management on-call rotation to help ensure availability goals for GitLab.com are met, working with reliability engineers and development team members.

What you’ll bring

• 3+ years of experience managing SRE, infrastructure, or platform engineering teams operating highly-available distributed systems at scale, ideally in a SaaS environment with customer-facing SLAs.
• Demonstrated ability to lead in a remote, high-performance environment, collaborating across multiple time zones and cultures.
• Experience running or significantly contributing to large-scale data migrations where customer data integrity and downtime risk must be carefully managed.
• Strong infrastructure background, including cloud platforms, observability, incident response, and distributed multi-tenant architectures.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts and risk trade-offs into clear, actionable insight for both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including customers.
• Strong problem-solving abilities and attention to detail, with a focus on delivering high-quality, low-risk operational outcomes in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Alignment with our company values and a commitment to working in accordance with those values.

It’s a Plus if You Have

• Experience working in or with managed/hosted environments similar to GitLab Dedicated, including regulated or compliance-sensitive customers (e.g., SOC2, ISO).
• Working knowledge of technologies commonly used in SRE and migration workflows (e.g., Kubernetes, Terraform, observability stacks, scripting languages).
• Used GitLab for personal or professional projects, and/or contributed to open source projects.
• Past experience working in an enterprise developer tools company or a high-growth infrastructure product company.

An overview of this role

You'll join the Dedicated team as a Site Reliability Engineer focused on Environment Automation, where your work will help power hundreds of isolated GitLab environments for our customers. In this role, you'll help keep these environments reliable, scalable, secure, and consistent by treating everything as code and contributing to automation across the entire lifecycle, from initial provisioning to day-to-day operations. Instead of operating a single platform, you'll collaborate with senior SREs to solve the unique challenges of managing many tenant environments in parallel, each with its own constraints and integration points.

You'll help define, deploy, and maintain GitLab environments across cloud providers using infrastructure as code, deployment packages, and Kubernetes. You'll contribute to automation that reduces manual work, assist in building tooling that orchestrates upgrades and configuration changes safely at scale, and support an observability stack that lets us understand and improve the health of every environment. Your work will directly impact how customers experience GitLab Dedicated and other managed offerings, enabling them to focus on building software while we ensure their GitLab environments are always production ready.

Some examples of work you'll do:

• Contribute to the design and evolution of infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes to provision, upgrade, and operate many GitLab environments with minimal manual effort
• Help debug and resolve production issues across Kubernetes clusters, GitLab components, and cloud services, then assist in building automation and safeguards that prevent similar issues from recurring
• Assist in creating and maintaining deployment and orchestration tools, such as Helm Charts, omnibus-gitlab configurations, and multi-tenant workflows, that make it easy for teams to manage GitLab environments at scale

What you'll do

• Contribute to automating operational tasks across many GitLab environments, from initial provisioning and configuration updates to upgrades and routine maintenance, helping reduce manual work and improve reliability at scale under the guidance of senior team members.
• Help build and refine the observability stack for multi-tenant GitLab environments so we monitor the right signals across Kubernetes, cloud services, and GitLab applications, supporting early issue detection and basic capacity tracking.
• Assist in responding to platform alerts and incidents, collaborating with Environment Automation SREs and engineering teams to troubleshoot production issues across multiple tenants and document findings.
• Support planning and implementation of infrastructure changes, capacity expansions, and new service rollouts for Dedicated and other managed GitLab environments, contributing to efforts that improve resource efficiency and environment isolation.
• Develop and maintain scripts, automation tools, and infrastructure-as-code workflows that manage parts of the GitLab environment lifecycle, enabling more repeatable, self-service operations over time.
• Apply and help implement best practices for running GitLab on Kubernetes and cloud platforms, focusing on day-to-day reliability, performance, and security while learning how to keep environments consistent.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for production GitLab environments with appropriate support, helping triage and mitigate incidents across clusters and cloud providers and contributing to post-incident reviews.
• Document operational tasks, runbooks, and lessons learned so they become clear, repeatable processes and can be candidates for future automation, improving shared knowledge and reducing manual toil across the team.

What you'll bring

• Experience working as an SRE or in a similar role operating production infrastructure, with an interest in automating the lifecycle of many environments or tenants in parallel, even if you have not yet done so at large scale.
• Hands-on experience with backend programming languages such as Golang, with the ability to read, understand, and modify infrastructure tools.
• Hands-on experience running Kubernetes-based workloads in production, including basic understanding of deployments, rollouts, and debugging common issues like crash loops, failed health checks, and scheduling problems.
• Familiarity with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools such as Terraform and Ansible, including experience working with modules, variables, and managing state safely for multiple environments.
• Solid understanding of Git-based workflows and infrastructure-as-code practices, with the ability to contribute to reusable modules, templates, and pipelines that make automation safer and more consistent.
• Experience working in distributed systems or cloud-based production environments, ideally in SaaS or managed service settings, with comfort participating in incident response and on-call rotations under guidance from more senior team members.
• A proactive mindset focused on automation and documentation—you look for opportunities to remove manual steps, improve runbooks, and turn repetitive tasks into reliable, self-service tools.
• Comfort working asynchronously across distributed teams and a desire to contribute to GitLab's values of collaboration, transparency, and iteration.

About the team

We are responsible for building, running, and evolving the entire lifecycle of the GitLab environments that power the GitLab Dedicated platform. You'll be part of our team focused on owning the reliability, scalability, performance, and security of automated single-tenant GitLab instances and their supporting services. GitLab Dedicated provides fully managed, isolated environments for customers around the world, which means your work directly impacts how organizations of all sizes run their mission-critical software delivery on GitLab. We operate in a fully distributed, asynchronous environment across multiple regions, collaborating on everything from infrastructure automation and environment lifecycle design to incident response and capacity planning. You'll be solving novel challenges at scale, from orchestrating infrastructure-as-code workflows across hundreds of tenants to designing the automation that keeps those environments consistent, secure, and up to date. We continuously seek to reduce complexity and improve efficiency by leveraging cloud vendor managed products and services where appropriate, ensuring GitLab Dedicated remains a best-in-class managed platform for our customers. For more on how we operate, see the relevant GitLab Dedicated and infrastructure handbook pages.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Engineer on the Runway team, you'll lead the design, evolution, and operation of the Kubernetes-based platform and developer tooling that powers GitLab's engineering organization. You'll drive strategic infrastructure initiatives across platform architecture, automation, and developer experience. That includes operating production Kubernetes clusters across cloud environments, scaling our ArgoCD-based GitOps workflows, and setting infrastructure-as-code practices and standards across teams. You'll mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and drive platform improvements that enhance reliability, observability, and security controls like RBAC and secrets management. Your work will establish clear patterns that make it easier for application teams to adopt modern practices and ship with confidence.

Some examples of our projects:

• Evolve ArgoCD GitOps standards across environments (Application Sets, sync policies, and deployment guardrails)
• Build reusable Terraform modules and practices for safe, repeatable cloud infrastructure provisioning and drift detection

What you'll do

• Manage and evolve production-grade Kubernetes clusters across cloud environments, contributing to architectural decisions on upgrades, scaling, disaster recovery, and reliability improvements.
• Implement and maintain GitOps workflows using ArgoCD, including Application Sets, sync policies, and deployment standards, and share best practices with teams adopting these patterns.
• Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules that enable safe, repeatable cloud infrastructure provisioning, including state management and drift detection practices.
• Lead incident response, drive post-mortems to clear conclusions, and implement improvements to availability, performance, and resilience as part of on-call rotation.
• Partner with application teams to onboard services onto the platform, writing documentation, runbooks, and self-service tooling that improves developer productivity.
• Implement security controls such as RBAC, network policies, and secrets management that meet compliance requirements.
• Contribute to CI pipeline integrations as part of end-to-end delivery workflows.

What you'll bring

• Proficiency in Go for writing and maintaining production-grade services and automation tooling, with the ability to guide others on best practices and code quality. Python or Bash experience is a plus.
• Hands-on experience owning production Kubernetes clusters across one or more cloud environments (for example, Amazon EKS, Google GKE, or Azure AKS), including upgrades, scaling, disaster recovery, and reliability engineering.
• Experience designing and operating GitOps-based continuous delivery workflows (for example, ArgoCD or Flux) and infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent), including reusable modules and safe infrastructure provisioning practices.
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals (DNS, load balancing, ingress) and the ability to reason through failure modes and design tradeoffs, not just apply familiar patterns.
• Ability to deliver well-structured, independently driven work, including clear documentation of decisions, tradeoffs, and future considerations, in support of a team that operates asynchronously across time zones.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write system documentation, establish runbooks, and share knowledge in ways that help the broader team move faster and get unblocked quickly.

About the team

The Runway team builds and operates the Kubernetes-based platform and developer tooling that GitLab engineers use to ship changes safely and reliably. We own core platform capabilities like production cluster lifecycle management, GitOps-based delivery workflows (ArgoCD), infrastructure as code foundations (Terraform modules and standards), and the reliability and observability practices that keep the platform healthy. We collaborate asynchronously with application and security partners to onboard services, improve self-service workflows, and strengthen controls like RBAC, network policies, and secrets management. The team's focus is reducing friction for developers while improving consistency, security, and operational confidence as the platform scales. For more on how this team works, see the Team Handbook Page.

An overview of this role

As a Cloud Cost Utilization SRE at GitLab, you will make cloud spending visible, understandable, and actionable across our infrastructure. This role sits at the intersection of engineering and financial accountability, where you will partner with Engineering, Finance, and Product to improve how cloud usage is tracked, attributed, and optimized across GitLab.

You will build and improve the systems, standards, and workflows that help teams understand the real cost of the services they run. That includes developing resource tagging and labeling approaches, improving billing data quality, and creating tooling that supports better decisions across AWS and GCP.

In this role, you will work through technical and organizational ambiguity, connect infrastructure data with business context, and help teams act on cost signals with confidence. This is a strong fit for someone who enjoys systems thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and building practical solutions in GitLab's all-remote, asynchronous, and values-driven environment.

Some examples of our projects

• Building cloud billing data pipelines that normalize multi-cloud cost data using the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS)
• Improving cloud resource tagging and labeling standards so teams can understand spend by service, environment, and ownership
• Developing cost anomaly detection, forecasting, and alerting workflows that give teams timely insight into infrastructure usage
• Extending observability systems so cost signals can be reviewed alongside reliability and operational data

What you'll do

• Design and maintain cloud resource tagging and labeling strategies across GCP and AWS to support accurate cost attribution
• Develop tooling and pipelines to ingest, normalize, and report on cloud billing data using the FOCUS specification
• Automate cost anomaly detection, forecasting, and alerting so engineering teams can respond quickly to changes in infrastructure spend
• Contribute to GitLab's observability and monitoring stacks, including Prometheus, LGTM (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, and Mimir), and ELK, with a focus on surfacing cost efficiency signals
• Partner with Finance and Engineering leadership to support cloud cost forecasting for planning and budget discussions
• Act as a subject matter expert for cloud cost attribution, tagging strategy, and FOCUS adoption across GitLab Infrastructure
• Collaborate with Finance and Compliance teams on audits, certifications, and financial reporting needs related to cloud infrastructure usage
• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code efforts, including Terraform and Ansible, so cost controls and tagging requirements are built into provisioning workflows from the start

What you'll bring

• Hands-on experience with cloud cost management in GCP and/or AWS, including billing data, pricing models, and optimization approaches
• Familiarity with, or interest in adopting, the FinOps FOCUS specification for multi-cloud cost analysis
• Experience designing or implementing cloud resource tagging and labeling strategies and improving adoption across teams
• Comfort working across technical and business functions, including Engineering, Finance, and other stakeholders
• Experience with infrastructure as code, including Terraform and Ansible
• Familiarity with observability tooling, including Grafana, and an understanding of how reliability and cost signals can be connected
• Ability to explain technical cost data clearly to non-engineering audiences and support informed decision-making
• A self-directed approach to work, with comfort operating in a fully remote and asynchronous environment

An overview of this role

As a Staff Engineer on the GitLab Delivery - Upgrades team, you’ll guide the technical direction for GitLab’s self-managed deployment strategy so customers can deploy, upgrade, and run GitLab reliably in their own infrastructure with minimal disruption. You’ll serve as a technical anchor for the team, working closely with your engineering manager, product manager, and partners across Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development to shape cloud-native, operator-driven deployment patterns that reduce operational complexity and upgrade friction. In your first year, you’ll help define the architecture for zero-downtime upgrades, strengthen observability and reliability practices, and guide the next generation of deployment automation for self-managed GitLab environments.

Some examples of our projects:

• Evolving GitLab Operator and Helm charts to support zero-downtime upgrades for complex, stateful GitLab installations
• Advancing the GitLab Environment Toolkit to simplify large-scale, production-ready self-managed deployments

What you’ll do

• Guide the technical vision and architecture for GitLab’s cloud-native, self-managed deployments and upgrade workflows.
• Establish operational maturity standards, service integration patterns, and deployment models that help development teams manage the lifecycle of their components.
• Design and maintain Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tooling for self-managed GitLab deployments across varied environments.
• Develop automation and integration frameworks for database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback paths.
• Define database and application lifecycle strategies, including safe PostgreSQL migration approaches and validation mechanisms that reduce downtime risk.
• Work with Product Management, GitLab.com Site Reliability Engineering, GitLab Dedicated, and development teams to align deployment patterns with customer needs.
• Mentor engineers and enable customer-facing teams through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and runbooks.
• Drive observability, testing, performance, and resilience practices for self-managed deployments, and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning.

What you’ll bring

• Strong software engineering experience designing and delivering production systems that customers install and operate in their own infrastructure.
• Proficiency in Go for large, complex codebases, with familiarity with Ruby on Rails and Rails application architecture as a useful addition.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production, including building and maintaining Operators, designing Helm charts for stateful applications, and working with Custom Resource Definitions, admission controllers, and controller patterns.
• Knowledge of cloud-native systems and tooling, such as service mesh, observability stacks, infrastructure as code, and automation tools like Terraform or Ansible.
• Experience with stateful workloads and databases, including PostgreSQL schema design and migrations, persistent volumes, storage classes, and approaches for reducing downtime during upgrades.
• Understanding of Linux systems and production operations, including package management, systemd, system-level debugging, observability, incident response, and on-call participation.
• Ability to guide through influence, including writing clear technical proposals, documenting decisions, mentoring engineers, and working effectively across teams.
• Interest in open source infrastructure or deployment tooling, or transferable experience from adjacent domains, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to different audiences.

About the team

The Delivery - Upgrades team sits within GitLab Delivery and focuses on delivering GitLab to self-managed users through supported, validated deployment tooling. We own and evolve the GitLab Omnibus package, Helm charts, GitLab Operator, and the GitLab Environment Toolkit, and we work asynchronously across regions with partners in Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development. Our work centers on enabling zero-downtime upgrades, reducing operational complexity at scale, supporting GitLab’s cloud-native transition while continuing to serve existing deployments, and improving the upgrade experience for customers running GitLab in diverse environments. For more on how we work, see [Link: Team Handbook Page].

An overview of this role

As a Backend Engineer on the Tenant Scale: Git team, you'll help improve one of the most widely used foundations of modern software development. Git is at the core of how developers collaborate, and this role focuses on making Git and Gitaly more capable, reliable, and efficient for GitLab and the people who use our platform. You'll contribute directly to upstream Git, help shape technical direction, and connect open source community discussions with GitLab product needs.

Reporting to the Git team lead, you'll work across Git and Gitaly to deliver changes that improve repository access, performance, and long-term maintainability. This is a unique opportunity to influence both an essential open source project and the systems GitLab uses to serve repositories at scale, while helping guide larger efforts that affect the future direction of Git.

• Some examples of our projects: contributing new features and fixes to upstream Git, and adapting Gitaly to make effective use of new and existing Git capabilities

What you’ll do

• Participate in architectural discussions and technical decisions related to Git and Gitaly, helping drive implementation choices that improve correctness, performance, and maintainability.
• Contribute features, bug fixes, and performance improvements to upstream Git in line with team and community goals, delivering changes that improve repository access and reliability for users.
• Adapt Gitaly to make effective use of Git capabilities, including integrating newly available features to improve scalability, efficiency, and long-term maintainability.
• Connect discussions in the open source Git project with GitLab's product direction and engineering work, helping align upstream contributions with product and platform needs.
• Scope tasks, estimate effort, and describe implementation plans that support the team's priorities and enable predictable delivery of technical work.
• Test and validate the features you build and integrate, with a focus on correctness and reliability to reduce regressions and support stable production use.
• Collaborate with team members, contributors and the Git ecosystem
• Represent GitLab as a constructive participant in the open source ecosystem, building productive relationships that support ongoing collaboration with the Git community.

What you’ll bring

• Experience building instrumented, observable software systems.
• Knowledge of Git internals, including its code and data structures, or practical experience operating Git servers.
• Experience writing and testing production-quality code in C.
• Experience contributing to open source projects, including Git or similar systems, and working effectively in public collaboration spaces.
• Familiarity with Go for backend development and understanding of Linux internals such as processes, memory management, input/output, and filesystems.
• Interest or experience in large-scale or distributed systems, storage formats, graph theory, or highly available production environments, including transferable backend or infrastructure experience.

About the team

The Tenant Scale: Git team works on the Git capabilities that underpin repository access in GitLab, with a strong connection to Gitaly and the upstream Git project. The team contributes directly to open source Git, improves how GitLab uses Git in production, and helps shape technical direction in areas such as performance, correctness, and maintainability. Team members collaborate asynchronously across regions, balancing internal engineering needs with active participation in public open source discussions. For more on the domain this role supports, see the Team Direction Page.

An overview of this role

As a Backend Engineer on the GitLab Upgrades team, you’ll help self-managed customers run GitLab with assurance by building and supporting the deployment tooling, infrastructure, and automation behind how GitLab is installed, upgraded, and operated. You’ll work across Omnibus GitLab, GitLab Helm Charts, the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET), and the GitLab Operator to improve reliability, security, and scalability in production-grade environments. This is a hands-on role where you’ll partner with Distribution Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Release Managers, Security, and Development teams to make self-managed GitLab easier to use across a wide range of platforms.

Some examples of our projects:

• Evolve Omnibus GitLab, Helm Charts, GET, and the GitLab Operator to support new GitLab features and architectures
• Improve installation, upgrade, and validation automation for large-scale self-managed GitLab deployments

What you’ll do

• Maintain and improve the Omnibus GitLab package so GitLab components work reliably in self-managed deployments.
• Develop and support GitLab Helm Charts for scalable, production-ready Kubernetes deployments.
• Enhance the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET) and validated reference architectures used by enterprise and internal users.
• Support and extend the GitLab Operator for Kubernetes-native lifecycle management of GitLab installations.
• Improve the installation, upgrade, and day-to-day operating experience across supported self-managed platforms.
• Collaborate with Security to address vulnerabilities and strengthen secure defaults and configurations across the deployment stack.
• Build and maintain automation and continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines that validate deployment tooling across Omnibus, Charts, GET, and the Operator.
• Partner with Distribution Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Release Managers, and Development teams to integrate new features and keep user-facing documentation accurate and useful.

What you’ll bring

• Experience building and maintaining backend services in production environments, especially in deployment, infrastructure, or platform tooling.
• Practical knowledge of Kubernetes operations, including authoring and maintaining Helm charts.
• Proficiency with Ruby and Go, along with scripting skills to automate workflows and tooling.
• Familiarity with Terraform and infrastructure as code practices across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Hands-on experience with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL, including performance and reliability considerations.
• Understanding of secure, scalable, and supportable deployment practices, along with observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Experience collaborating in large codebases and distributed teams, including writing clear user-facing documentation and implementation guides.
• Openness to learning new technologies and applying transferable skills across different parts of the GitLab deployment stack.

About the team

The Upgrades team is part of GitLab Delivery and delivers GitLab to self-managed users through supported, validated deployment tooling. The team maintains Omnibus GitLab, Helm Charts, the GitLab Operator, and the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET) to help self-managed users deploy GitLab securely and reliably across diverse environments. You’ll join a distributed group of backend engineers that works asynchronously across time zones and collaborates closely with Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development teams. The team is focused on improving installation and upgrade workflows, strengthening automation and security, and helping self-managed customers run GitLab successfully at any scale.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the GitLab Upgrades team, you’ll help self-managed customers run GitLab reliably by building and maintaining the infrastructure, tooling, and automation behind our deployment options. You’ll work across Omnibus GitLab, GitLab Helm Charts, the GitLab Environment Toolkit (Get), and the GitLab Operator to make GitLab easier to deploy, more secure by default, and scalable across major cloud providers and a wide range of customer environments. In this role, you’ll partner closely with engineering teams and act as a bridge to customer needs, improving installation, upgrade, and day-to-day operations for production-grade GitLab deployments.

Some examples of our projects:

• Evolving Omnibus GitLab, Helm Charts, GET, and the GitLab Operator to support validated reference architectures for enterprise-scale deployments
• Building automation pipelines and observability into deployment tooling to validate, test, and operate GitLab across Kubernetes and other self-managed environments

What you’ll do

• Maintain and evolve the Omnibus GitLab package to support reliable, production-ready self-managed deployments, improving deployment stability, increasing upgrade success rates, and reducing escalation rates.
• Develop and improve GitLab Helm Charts so core components integrate cleanly and scale across supported environments, reducing deployment friction, shortening time to deploy, and improving operational consistency at scale.
• Enhance the GitLab Environment Toolkit (Get), validated reference architectures, and the GitLab Operator for secure, Kubernetes-native lifecycle management, improving reliability, strengthening security baselines, and accelerating adoption in customer environments.
• Improve installation, upgrade, and operational workflows across deployment methods to create a consistent experience for self-managed customers, reducing operational overhead, lowering failure rates, and increasing consistency across deployment methods.
• Partner with Security to address vulnerabilities and deliver secure defaults and configurations in the deployment stack, reducing exposure to vulnerabilities and improving baseline security across self-managed deployments.
• Build and maintain automation and continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that validate and test Omnibus, Charts, Get, and the Operator, increasing release confidence, improving test coverage, and reducing regressions across deployment tooling.
• Work closely with Distribution Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Release Managers, and Development teams to integrate new features into deployment methods and keep them reliable, scalable, and aligned with customer needs, improving delivery readiness and reducing operational issues after release.
• Guide architectural direction, mentor backend engineers, and contribute to the roadmap for self-managed delivery, improving technical quality, accelerating delivery effectiveness, and strengthening team execution.

What you’ll bring

• Experience operating backend services in production, including deployment, monitoring, and maintenance in Kubernetes- and Helm-based environments.
• Proficiency in Go for building observable and resilient services, with working knowledge of Ruby as a useful addition.
• Hands-on practice with infrastructure as code, including tools such as Terraform, and with managing infrastructure across cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure.
• Knowledge of database design, operations, and troubleshooting, especially for PostgreSQL in secure and scalable setups.
• Knowledge of secure, scalable, and reliable deployment practices, including service scaling and rollout strategies.
• Familiarity with observability tools and patterns such as Prometheus and Grafana to monitor system health and performance.
• Ability to work effectively in large codebases and coordinate across distributed, cross-functional teams using clear written communication.
• Openness to transferable experience from related backend or infrastructure roles, along with the ability to write user-focused documentation and implementation guides.

About the team

The Upgrades team is part of GitLab Delivery and focuses on helping self-managed customers run GitLab successfully in their own environments, from smaller deployments to large enterprise footprints. We own deployment and operational tooling across our work on Omnibus GitLab, Helm Charts, Get, and the GitLab Operator, and we work as a globally distributed, all-remote group that works asynchronously with Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development teams across regions. We are focused on making self-managed GitLab easier to deploy, upgrade, secure, and operate at scale. For more on how we work, see Team Handbook Page.

An overview of this role

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are responsible for keeping all user-facing services and other GitLab production systems running smoothly. SREs are a blend of pragmatic operators and software craftspeople who apply sound engineering principles, operational discipline, and mature automation to our operating environments and the GitLab codebase.

In this role, you will join the Tenant Services, Geo team. Geo is a feature that replicates data from a GitLab instance to a warm-standby, and is used both for data migrations and disaster recovery. The Tenant Services, Geo team is responsible for supporting GitLab Dedicated customer migrations and Geo-related escalations across GitLab Dedicated (excluding FedRAMP environments).

We don’t expect you to have prior experience with Geo or Gitaly; familiarity with disaster recovery technologies or GitLab itself is sufficient, and we’ll support you in learning our specific stack.

The team’s mandate spans the full Geo operational surface, pre- and post-cutover data hygiene, migration execution, and non-migration Geo escalations, working closely with the core Geo team, Dedicated migrations, and Support. You will help evolve a reliable, low-risk cutover model for Dedicated migrations while improving tooling, automation, and observability so migrations become faster, safer, and more predictable over time.

What you’ll do

• Execute Dedicated Geo migrations and cutovers end-to-end, including planning, pre-cutover validation, execution, and post-cutover verification and cleanup.
• Join the team’s shift and weekend coverage rotation for Dedicated cutovers across EMEA and US hours, and participate in the SaaS Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) on-call rotation to respond to incidents that impact GitLab.com availability.
• Operate and improve the Geo operational surface for Dedicated, including:
• Environment preparation and data hygiene checks prior to migrations.
• Execution of replication, validation, and cutover procedures.
• Handling Geo-related escalations from Support and internal partners.
• Design, build, and maintain automation, tooling, and runbooks that make migrations, cutovers, and Geo escalations as “boring” and repeatable as possible.
• Run our infrastructure with tools such as Ansible, Chef, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, and Kubernetes; contribute improvements back to GitLab’s product and infrastructure where appropriate.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards that:
• Detect symptoms early, not just outages.
• Track migration and cutover success rates, duration, rollback frequency, and related SLOs.
• Collaborate closely with:
• The core Geo team on improving Geo features and operability.
• Dedicated migrations and Support on migration planning, customer communications, and escalation handling.
• Other Infrastructure teams on capacity planning, disaster recovery, and reliability improvements.
• Contribute to readiness reviews, incident reviews, and root cause analyses, turning learnings into changes in automation, process, or product.
• Document every action, including runbooks, architecture decisions, and post-incident reviews, so your findings turn into repeatable practices and automation.
• Proactively identify and reduce toil by automating repetitive operational work and simplifying migration workflows.

What you’ll bring

• Experience operating highly-available distributed systems at scale, ideally in a SaaS environment with customer-facing SLAs.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (e.g., Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services), including networking, storage, and managed services.
• Experience with Kubernetes and its ecosystem (e.g., Helm), including deploying and troubleshooting workloads.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Chef.
• Strong programming skills in at least one general-purpose language (preferably Go or Ruby) and proficiency with scripting (e.g., Shell, Python).
• Experience with observability systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, logging stacks) and using metrics and logs to troubleshoot performance and reliability issues.
• Practical exposure to data replication, backup/restore, or migration scenarios (e.g., database replication, storage replication, or Geo-like technologies) where data integrity and downtime risk must be carefully managed.
• Comfort participating in an on-call rotation, investigating incidents across the stack, and driving follow-through on corrective actions.
• Ability to engage directly with enterprise customers during migrations and incidents, including on live calls and through clear written updates.
• Ability to clearly define problems, propose options, and think beyond immediate fixes to improve systems and processes over time.
• Ability to be a “manager of one”: self-directed, organized, and able to drive work to completion in a remote, asynchronous environment.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a bias toward clear, asynchronous documentation and collaboration.
• Alignment with our company values and a commitment to working in accordance with those values.

It’s a plus if you have

• Experience working with disaster recovery technologies.
• Experience with managed/hosted environments similar to GitLab Dedicated, including regulated or compliance-sensitive customers (e.g., SOC2, ISO).
• Prior work on large-scale data migrations or cutovers where customer data integrity, performance, and downtime risk had to be carefully balanced.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating database replication, backup/restore, and cutover workflows (for example, PostgreSQL or cloud-managed equivalents such as AWS RDS), including planning and executing low-risk migrations for large datasets.
• Experience with multi-tenant architectures, sharding, or routing strategies in high-traffic SaaS platforms.
• Familiarity with GitLab (self-managed or SaaS), and/or contributions to open source projects.

An overview of this role

As a Senior Engineering Manager in Delivery Enablement, you'll help shape the platform foundations we use to make software delivery at GitLab more consistent, reliable, and easier to scale. You'll oversee approximately four to five engineering teams through the engineering managers who lead them, with work spanning shared development tooling, developer environments, language SDKs, API lifecycle management, and observability. This role is unique because you'll help define a Kubernetes-first platform vision that supports GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed deployments, including environments that run on premises. In your first year, you'll create clearer technical direction, strengthen execution across teams, and align work to unified platform standards. You'll report to the Director of Delivery Enablement.

You'll succeed by combining people management with technical depth: engaging in details, making sound calls amid change, and moving teams forward with transparency and accountability. This role is ideal if you have experience in platform engineering, grasp the complexities of operating across both cloud and on-prem environments, and want to work in a space where Kubernetes, Helm, AI-enabled workflows, and developer productivity intersect.

The work spans areas such as:

• Shared development tooling, including project templates and reusable CI pipeline components
• A developer environment that gives engineers a consistent path from local workstations and CI through to GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed
• Language SDKs that integrate cleanly with platform tooling so product teams can focus on business logic instead of integration plumbing
• API lifecycle conventions that give teams a common approach to versioning and evolving service interfaces
• Observability tooling that turns raw signals into SLOs and SLIs for production services

What you’ll do

• Lead engineering teams working on developer tooling and platform capabilities that support faster, more consistent software delivery across GitLab, measured through improvements in build times, observability, and delivery consistency.
• Drive a Kubernetes-first platform vision that supports both cloud and self-managed environments, including the tradeoffs needed for on-prem delivery.
• Guide technical and organizational decisions across areas such as developer environments, packaging, local and hosted testing workflows, and integration with broader platform efforts.
• Collaborate closely with engineering leaders, staff engineers, and adjacent teams to ensure DevEx investments connect cleanly with platform architecture and operational needs.
• Coach and develop the engineering managers reporting to you, partnering with them on team health, performance, prioritization, and hiring, including addressing performance concerns and shaping teams for future needs.
• Develop clear direction from high-level strategy, turning broad platform goals into actionable roadmaps with defined milestones and success metrics that teams can execute with ownership.
• Support the adoption of AI-assisted development practices by helping teams use new tools thoughtfully while maintaining engineering quality.
• Improve execution by creating clarity, encouraging strong technical discussion, and helping teams make decisions and keep moving when requirements evolve, with success measured by delivery predictability and cycle time improvements.

What you’ll bring

• Experience managing engineering managers and coaching them on execution, team health, hiring, and performance.
• Experience leading distributed engineering teams through change and ambiguity while building clarity, accountability, and momentum.
• Strong technical grounding in Kubernetes platforms, including familiarity with concepts and interfaces such as Services, container network interface, and API gateways.
• Working knowledge of Helm and containerized delivery models, especially where platform choices affect both developer experience and production outcomes.
• Experience with self-managed, on-prem, or bare metal environments (OpenShift, OpenStack, Proxmox, etc.), and an understanding of how they differ from cloud-first assumptions.
• Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and contribute informed judgment on platform architecture and cross-team system integration.
• Hands-on experience with CLI-based AI coding tools, with judgment to help teams adopt them thoughtfully while maintaining engineering standards.
• Relevant background in platform engineering, infrastructure, site reliability engineering, or developer productivity, including designing team structures and organizational approaches.

About the team

The Delivery Enablement team owns key parts of GitLab's internal developer experience, helping engineers start projects, build business logic, package services consistently, and improve day-to-day workflows. We work asynchronously across regions and partner closely with platform and engineering leadership to connect individual tools and workflows into a broader system. We're focused on an important transition: reducing reliance on older approaches, defining clearer platform standards, and building foundations that better support how GitLab develops and ships software. For more on how our team works, see [Link: Team Handbook Page].