Principal Database Engineer - Data Engineering & Monetization

An overview of this role

GitLab is building the future of DevOps at unprecedented scale. As our Principal Database Engineer, you'll architect the data platform foundation that powers both GitLab.com and thousands of enterprise deployments worldwide. This is an opportunity to design and build industry-leading database systems that enable GitLab's next phase of growth. You'll transform how we approach data reliability, scale our platform to support exponential growth, and establish patterns that become the gold standard for database development and operations. Working with our exceptional engineering talent, you'll have everything needed to create lasting impact.

In this role, you'll architect scalable, distributed solutions that transform how we manage and leverage data across our SaaS and self-managed deployments, supporting enterprise-scale growth. Combining deep technical expertise with strategic influence—you'll build proactive database health frameworks, drive adoption of modern database technologies and data stores, and create solutions that prevent incidents before they impact customers. Working at the intersection of product and infrastructure, you'll shape GitLab's data foundation while enabling engineering teams to succeed through self-service tools, best practices, and automated reliability.

What You’ll Do  

• Lead database architecture and strategy for GitLab.com's PostgreSQL infrastructure, designing scalable solutions that support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users while ensuring reliability, performance, and long-term growth planning

• Build proactive database health and reliability frameworks that prevent incidents and customer escalations through continuous monitoring, automated remediation, and predictive analytics that surface issues before they impact users

• Drive database excellence across engineering teams by establishing best practices, providing expert guidance on migrations and query optimization, and building self-service tools and guardrails that enable teams to succeed while maintaining database health

• Own end-to-end observability and operational excellence by designing symptom-based monitoring systems, leading incident mitigation efforts, and transforming learnings into automated, repeatable processes that eliminate recurring issues

• Shape GitLab's database platform evolution by evaluating and implementing modern database technologies and data stores, influencing organizational adoption through evidence-based recommendations and hands-on solutions that improve both product capabilities and production stability

• Bring a multi-platform mindset by designing and evaluating solutions that will help scale both GitLab.com and be manageable for our self managed customers. 

• Build partnerships between product and infrastructure teams to ensure that product and team decisions align with the infrastructure team’s priorities.

• Break down long-term goals into incremental, actionable steps that deliver customer value

• Spend time in the codebase to maintain technical credibility and team empathy

• Ship working solutions to customers over creating presentations or theoretical designs

• Provide strategic context and leadership while leveraging domain expertise from peers across projects

• Deep-dive into critical technical problems for extended periods when needed

What You’ll Bring 

• Experience architecting, operating, and optimizing PostgreSQL in large-scale distributed systems with high availability and disaster recovery requirements

• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL internals including query planner, WAL mechanics, vacuum processes, and storage engine optimization

• Proven track record designing and maintaining highly distributed production database environments with automated failover, monitoring, and self-healing capabilities

• Strong advocate for infrastructure-as-code, GitOps practices, security hardening, and SRE principles in database operations

• Proven ability to debug across the full stack, from low-level systems (Postgres, Elasticsearch source code) to frontend (TypeScript)

• Strong hands-on coding skills with experience balancing strategic leadership and technical execution

• Track record of delivering results through collaboration with technical experts

• You have strong, well-informed opinions on database technologies and data stores backed by factual evidence, and can effectively influence the organization to adopt modern data stack solutions.

Challenges You’ll Tackle

• Design solutions for uncontrolled data growth while maintaining performance and cost efficiency

• Address critical customer pain points around database upgrades and migrations that impact support escalations

• Create a sustainable operational model that scales with our growth without linear headcount increases

• Build the foundation for GitLab's next-generation data architecture including sharding, multi-database support, and emerging data technologies

• Shape the evolution of our database incident response strategy from a reactive high-toil model, to a proactive platform organization

About the team

Data Engineering and Monetization is a newly formed function within the Engineering Org with a mission to build a comprehensive foundation of data platforms with responsible data architecture that scales.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range

$157,900—$338,400 USD