Staff Backend Engineer, GitLab Delivery: Upgrades

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 component lifecycles.
• 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.
• Collaborate with Product Management, 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; 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 production experience with Kubernetes, 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, including service mesh, observability stacks, infrastructure as code, and automation tools such as 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 by writing 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 and employee stock purchase plan
• Growth and development fund
• Parental leave