Staff Backend Engineer, Gitlab Delivery: Operate

Join Our Team as a Staff Backend Engineer

At GitLab, we are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join our Delivery - Operate team. In this role, you will shape the technical direction for our self-managed deployment strategy. Your work will help customers deploy, upgrade, and run GitLab smoothly in their own infrastructure.

About the Role

As a Staff Engineer on the GitLab Delivery - Operate team, you will guide the technical direction for GitLab’s self-managed deployment strategy. You will work closely with your engineering manager, product manager, and partners across Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development. Your focus will be on creating cloud-native, operator-driven deployment patterns that simplify operations and upgrades. In your first year, you will define the architecture for zero-downtime upgrades, enhance observability and reliability practices, and lead 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 for development teams.
• Design and maintain Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tools for self-managed GitLab deployments.
• Develop automation and integration frameworks for database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback paths.
• Define database and application lifecycle strategies to minimize downtime risk.
• Collaborate with Product Management, Site Reliability Engineering, GitLab Dedicated, and development teams to align deployment patterns with customer needs.
• Mentor engineers and support 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 We're Looking For

• Strong software engineering experience in designing and delivering production systems for customer infrastructure.
• Proficiency in Go for large, complex codebases, with familiarity in Ruby on Rails as a plus.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production, including building and maintaining Operators and designing Helm charts.
• Knowledge of cloud-native systems and tooling, including service mesh, observability stacks, and automation tools like Terraform or Ansible.
• Experience with stateful workloads and databases, including PostgreSQL schema design and migrations.
• Understanding of Linux systems and production operations, including package management and system-level debugging.
• Ability to guide through influence, including writing clear technical proposals and mentoring engineers.
• Interest in open source infrastructure or deployment tooling, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly.

About the Team

The Delivery - Operate team is part of GitLab Delivery. We focus on providing GitLab to self-managed users through supported deployment tools. We own and evolve the GitLab Omnibus package, Helm charts, GitLab Operator, and the GitLab Environment Toolkit. Our work aims to enable zero-downtime upgrades, reduce operational complexity, and improve the upgrade experience for customers.

What We Offer

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental leave
• Home office support

We encourage candidates with varying levels of experience to apply. Many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. If you're excited about this role, please apply and let us assess your application.

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GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We base our recruitment and employment practices solely on merit. We do not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any characteristic protected by law. If you need accommodation during the recruiting process, please let us know.