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
• Experience building or maintaining Operators for complex stateful applications (databases, message queues, etc.)
• Ruby on Rails expertise and understanding of Rails application architecture
• Infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools
• Background in Site Reliability Engineering or DevOps with production on-call experience
• Understanding of compliance and security requirements for enterprise software deployments
• Experience with observability platforms
• Open source contribution history, particularly in infrastructure or deployment tooling
• 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'll 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
• Lead the technical vision and architecture for GitLab's cloud-native, self-managed deployments and zero-downtime upgrades, balancing operational simplicity, customer needs, and engineering constraints to improve upgrade success rates and reduce customer downtime
• Establish and champion operational maturity standards, service integration patterns, and deployment models; provide cross-group technical leadership on complex initiatives so development teams can own the end-to-end lifecycle of their components while reducing upgrade risk and operational complexity
• Design, implement, and maintain production-grade Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tooling that automate lifecycle management for self-managed GitLab deployments at varying scales, reducing manual operations and configuration errors
• Develop integration and automation frameworks that handle database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollbacks, enabling product teams to ship new services with standardized deployment patterns and predictable release outcomes
• Define and evolve database and application lifecycle strategies—including safe PostgreSQL migrations, compatibility layers, and pre-flight/validation checks—to minimize downtime, failed upgrades, and rollback frequency across self-managed environments
• Collaborate with Product Management, GitLab.com SRE, GitLab Dedicated, and development teams to define integration requirements, align deployment patterns and operational practices, and translate customer needs into scalable self-managed solutions
• Mentor and enable engineers and customer-facing teams through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and runbooks that improve deployment reliability, supportability, and customer success
• Define and implement observability, testing, performance, and resilience practices for self-managed deployments—including metrics, logging, alerting, benchmarks, capacity guidance, and failure-handling patterns—and contribute to incident response and post-mortems to continuously improve reliability, upgrade success rates, and mean time to recovery (MTTR)