Staff Backend Engineer, Gitlab Delivery: Upgrades
GitLab
Bangalore, IndiaPosted 1 month ago
Skill Required
Platforms EngineeringBackend DeveloperGitSOCRailsObservabilityIstioPostgreSQLKubernetesTerraformAnsibleLinuxRubyHelm
Key highlights
- Staff Engineer role on the GitLab Delivery – Upgrades team.
- Must have strong software engineering experience delivering production systems for self‑managed infrastructure.
- Proficiency in Go is required; familiarity with Ruby on Rails is a plus.
- Hands‑on production Kubernetes experience, including Operators and Helm charts.
- Flexible Paid Time Off and Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
- Remote‑first position with global hiring and location‑based eligibility considerations.
Role overview
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.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- 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.
- 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.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with Ruby on Rails and Rails application architecture.
Benefits
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
- Health, finances, and well‑being support
Additional details
- GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, trusted by more than 50 million registered users and over 50% of the Fortune 100.
- All team members are expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows as a core productivity multiplier.
- GitLab’s high‑performance culture is driven by values and continuous knowledge exchange, encouraging every voice to be valued.
- Candidates with varying levels of experience are welcomed; many successful hires do not meet every single requirement.
- Country Hiring Guidelines: roles are remote but may have location‑based eligibility requirements; the Talent Acquisition team can clarify after recruiting begins.
- Privacy Policy: recruitment privacy policy is available for review.
- GitLab is an equal‑opportunity workplace and affirmative action employer, with comprehensive EEO policies and accommodations for disabilities.