Staff Backend Engineer, GitLab Delivery: Upgrades

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Guide 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
• ▹Design and maintain Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tooling
• ▹Develop automation for database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback paths
• ▹Define database and application lifecycle strategies, including safe PostgreSQL migration approaches
• ▹Work with Product Management, GitLab.com SRE, GitLab Dedicated, and development teams
• ▹Mentor engineers and enable customer-facing teams through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and runbooks

Requirements

• ▹Strong software engineering experience designing production systems that customers install and operate themselves
• ▹Proficiency in Go for large, complex codebases; Ruby on Rails familiarity a plus
• ▹Hands-on production Kubernetes experience: building Operators, designing Helm charts for stateful apps, CRDs, admission controllers
• ▹Knowledge of cloud-native systems and tooling: service mesh, observability stacks, IaC, Terraform or Ansible
• ▹Experience with stateful workloads and databases: PostgreSQL schema design/migrations, persistent volumes, storage classes
• ▹Understanding of Linux systems and production operations: package management, systemd, incident response, on-call
• ▹Ability to guide through influence: technical proposals, documentation, mentoring

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Flexible Paid Time Off
• ▹Team Member Resource Groups
• ▹Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• ▹Growth and Development Fund
• ▹Parental Leave

About the company

The Delivery - Upgrades team sits within GitLab Delivery, owning and evolving the GitLab Omnibus package, Helm charts, GitLab Operator, and GitLab Environment Toolkit for self-managed users.