Staff Backend Engineer, Gitlab Delivery

Posted 7ds ago

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Job Description

Staff Engineer on GitLab Delivery guiding the technical direction for self-managed deployments and upgrade workflows. Responsible for reducing operational complexity and shaping cloud-native deployment patterns.

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, 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.