Staff Engineer, GitLab

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3+ years in platform engineering or infrastructure roles
• Expert-level Go proficiency (Ruby and Rails as a plus) with demonstrated ability to work in large, complex codebases
• Production Kubernetes experience, including:
• Building and maintaining Kubernetes Operators
• Designing Helm charts for complex stateful applications
• Understanding of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), admission controllers, and controller patterns
• Experience with stateful workloads, persistent volumes, and storage classes
• Cloud-native architecture experience, including service mesh, observability stacks, and infrastructure as code
• Experience shipping production software that customers install and operate in their own infrastructure
• Understanding of Linux systems, including package management, systemd, and system-level debugging
• Technical Leadership Qualities:
• Technical influence and communication: Ability to design holistic solutions balancing multiple constraints, write clear technical proposals and documentation, and work across teams influencing without direct authority
• Team development and execution: Track record of mentoring and elevating team capabilities through teaching and code review, combined with pragmatic decision-making and bias for action when facing incomplete information

Desirable

• As a Staff Engineer within the GitLab Operate team, you will lead the technical direction for GitLab's self-managed deployment strategy, with a particular focus on solving zero-downtime upgrades and operational excellence at scale
• This is a high-impact technical leadership role where you'll architect and implement the systems that enable thousands of organizations to deploy, upgrade, and operate GitLab reliably in their own infrastructure
• You'll be the technical anchor for our newly formed Operate team, driving the evolution of GitLab's deployment tooling from traditional packaging approaches toward cloud-native, operator-driven automation
• Your work will directly impact GitLab's ability to deliver new features to self-managed customers faster while dramatically reducing operational complexity and upgrading friction
• The GitLab Operate team serves as a critical bridge between GitLab engineering and our self-managed customers, ensuring our products are easily deployable, secure, and scalable across a range of environments—from single-node VM deployments to large-scale Kubernetes clusters supporting tens of thousands of users
• Define the technical vision for GitLab's cloud-native deployment and upgrades future, balancing operational simplicity, customer needs, and engineering constraints
• Lead the design and implementation of the new tooling, including Operator(s), enabling automated lifecycle management and zero-downtime upgrades
• Architect upgrade orchestration systems that safely coordinate complex multi-component upgrades across databases, application services, and auxiliary components
• Establish operational maturity standards and guidance for new services being integrated into GitLab's deployment tooling and empowering development teams for the end-to-end of their components
• Drive technical decisions around service integration patterns, deployment models, and operational interfaces
• Lead complex initiatives overarching multiple groups and be the technical leadership voice that set the direction and drives technical decisions
• Platform Engineering & Development
• Design production-grade Kubernetes Operators that aims to reliable reconciliation logic for complex stateful applications
• Design and implement upgrade orchestration that handles database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback capabilities
• Develop tooling and automation to reduce the operational complexity of running GitLab at scale
• Create integration frameworks that enable development teams to ship new services with standardized deployment patterns
• Maintain and evolve GitLab Helm Charts to support both simple and complex deployment topologies
• Database & Application Lifecycle Management
• Contribute to safe database migration strategies for zero-downtime upgrades across PostgreSQL and other stateful components
• Implement compatibility layers that enable incremental upgrades without requiring simultaneous updates across all components
• Design and contribute to build validation and pre-flight check systems that detect potential upgrade issues before they impact production
• Cross-Functional Collaboration & Enablement
• Partner with development teams to define integration requirements for new services and features
• Collaborate with GitLab Dedicated and Gitlab.com SRE teams to align deployment patterns and operational practices
• Work with Product Management to translate customer needs into technical requirements
• Mentor and guide other engineers on the team, establishing technical standards and best practices
• Create technical documentation and runbooks that enable customer success and support teams
• Production Operations & Reliability
• Define and implement observability standards for self-managed deployments, including metrics, logging, and alerting
• Build automated testing frameworks that validate deployment and upgrade scenarios across reference architectures
• Establish performance benchmarks and capacity planning guidance for different deployment scales
• Design resilience patterns for handling failures during upgrades and operations
• Contribute to incident response and post-mortems for self-managed deployment issues
• As a Staff engineer, you'll work closely with the engineering manager and product manager to define technical direction while mentoring other engineers on the team