Staff Engineer, GitLab Delivery - Operate
An overview of this role
As a Staff Engineer within the GitLab Operate team, you will lead the technical direction for GitLab's self-managed deployment strategy, with a particular focus on solving zero-downtime upgrades and operational excellence at scale. This is a high-impact technical leadership role where you'll architect and implement the systems that enable thousands of organizations to deploy, upgrade, and operate GitLab reliably in their own infrastructure.
You'll be the technical anchor for our newly formed Operate team, driving the evolution of GitLab's deployment tooling from traditional packaging approaches toward cloud-native, operator-driven automation. Your work will directly impact GitLab's ability to deliver new features to self-managed customers faster while dramatically reducing operational complexity and upgrading friction.
The GitLab Operate team serves as a critical bridge between GitLab engineering and our self-managed customers, ensuring our products are easily deployable, secure, and scalable across a range of environments—from single-node VM deployments to large-scale Kubernetes clusters supporting tens of thousands of users.
What you'll do
Technical Leadership & Architecture
Define the technical vision for GitLab's cloud-native deployment and upgrades future, balancing operational simplicity, customer needs, and engineering constraints
Lead the design and implementation of the new tooling, including Operator(s), enabling automated lifecycle management and zero-downtime upgrades
Architect upgrade orchestration systems that safely coordinate complex multi-component upgrades across databases, application services, and auxiliary components
Establish operational maturity standards and guidance for new services being integrated into GitLab's deployment tooling and empowering development teams for the end-to-end of their components
Drive technical decisions around service integration patterns, deployment models, and operational interfaces
Lead complex initiatives overarching multiple groups and be the technical leadership voice that set the direction and drives technical decisions
Platform Engineering & Development
Design production-grade Kubernetes Operators that aims to reliable reconciliation logic for complex stateful applications
Design and implement upgrade orchestration that handles database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback capabilities
Develop tooling and automation to reduce the operational complexity of running GitLab at scale
Create integration frameworks that enable development teams to ship new services with standardized deployment patterns
Maintain and evolve GitLab Helm Charts to support both simple and complex deployment topologies
Database & Application Lifecycle Management
Contribute to safe database migration strategies for zero-downtime upgrades across PostgreSQL and other stateful components
Implement compatibility layers that enable incremental upgrades without requiring simultaneous updates across all components
Design and contribute to build validation and pre-flight check systems that detect potential upgrade issues before they impact production
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Enablement
Partner with development teams to define integration requirements for new services and features
Collaborate with GitLab Dedicated and Gitlab.com SRE teams to align deployment patterns and operational practices
Work with Product Management to translate customer needs into technical requirements
Mentor and guide other engineers on the team, establishing technical standards and best practices
Create technical documentation and runbooks that enable customer success and support teams
Production Operations & Reliability
Define and implement observability standards for self-managed deployments, including metrics, logging, and alerting
Build automated testing frameworks that validate deployment and upgrade scenarios across reference architectures
Establish performance benchmarks and capacity planning guidance for different deployment scales
Design resilience patterns for handling failures during upgrades and operations
Contribute to incident response and post-mortems for self-managed deployment issues
What you'll bring
Required Experience & Skills
8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3+ years in platform engineering or infrastructure roles
Expert-level Go proficiency (Ruby and Rails as a plus) with demonstrated ability to work in large, complex codebases
Production Kubernetes experience, including:
Building and maintaining Kubernetes Operators
Designing Helm charts for complex stateful applications
Understanding of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), admission controllers, and controller patterns
Experience with stateful workloads, persistent volumes, and storage classes
Cloud-native architecture experience, including service mesh, observability stacks, and infrastructure as code
Experience shipping production software that customers install and operate in their own infrastructure
Understanding of Linux systems, including package management, systemd, and system-level debugging
Highly Valued Experience
Experience building or maintaining Operators for complex stateful applications (databases, message queues, etc.)
Ruby on Rails expertise and understanding of Rails application architecture
Infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools
Background in Site Reliability Engineering or DevOps with production on-call experience
Understanding of compliance and security requirements for enterprise software deployments
Experience with observability platforms
Open source contribution history, particularly in infrastructure or deployment tooling
Technical Leadership Qualities
Technical influence and communication: Ability to design holistic solutions balancing multiple constraints, write clear technical proposals and documentation, and work across teams influencing without direct authority
Team development and execution: Track record of mentoring and elevating team capabilities through teaching and code review, combined with pragmatic decision-making and bias for action when facing incomplete information
What Makes You Stand Out
You've built Kubernetes Operators in production and dealt with the operational complexities of stateful workload management
You have deep PostgreSQL expertise, including schema design and migration strategies, replication, backup, and recovery, handling database upgrades with minimal downtime
You have deep experience with database migrations at scale and understand the tradeoffs between downtime and complexity
You've shipped software that customers install on-premises and have felt the pain of upgrade friction firsthand
You contribute to open source infrastructure projects and understand community dynamics
You can explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
You have experience with zero-downtime deployment strategies for monolithic applications transitioning to microservices
You've been on-call for production systems and understand what makes software operable
About the team
The Operate team is part of GitLab Delivery and focuses on delivering GitLab to self-managed users through supported and validated tooling. This includes maintaining and evolving the GitLab Omnibus package, Helm Charts, GitLab Operator, and the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET).
We partner with SRE, Release, Security, and Development teams to ensure GitLab is easily deployable, supportable, and production-ready in diverse environments—from small single-node deployments to large enterprise-scale Kubernetes clusters.
Current challenges we're tackling:
Zero-downtime upgrades: Enabling self-managed customers to upgrade GitLab without service interruption
Operational complexity: Reducing the burden of managing GitLab at scale while expanding our service architecture
Cloud-native transition: Building the next generation of deployment tooling while supporting existing customers
Upgrade velocity: Reducing the time it takes for 80% of self-managed customers to adopt new releases from 7.8 months to 4 months
Team structure:
You'll be joining a newly consolidated Operate team that is building the capability to deliver GitLab's expanding service architecture to self-managed customers. As a Staff engineer, you'll work closely with the engineering manager and product manager to define technical direction while mentoring other engineers on the team.
About the job
Apply for this position
Staff Engineer, GitLab Delivery - Operate
An overview of this role
As a Staff Engineer within the GitLab Operate team, you will lead the technical direction for GitLab's self-managed deployment strategy, with a particular focus on solving zero-downtime upgrades and operational excellence at scale. This is a high-impact technical leadership role where you'll architect and implement the systems that enable thousands of organizations to deploy, upgrade, and operate GitLab reliably in their own infrastructure.
You'll be the technical anchor for our newly formed Operate team, driving the evolution of GitLab's deployment tooling from traditional packaging approaches toward cloud-native, operator-driven automation. Your work will directly impact GitLab's ability to deliver new features to self-managed customers faster while dramatically reducing operational complexity and upgrading friction.
The GitLab Operate team serves as a critical bridge between GitLab engineering and our self-managed customers, ensuring our products are easily deployable, secure, and scalable across a range of environments—from single-node VM deployments to large-scale Kubernetes clusters supporting tens of thousands of users.
What you'll do
Technical Leadership & Architecture
Define the technical vision for GitLab's cloud-native deployment and upgrades future, balancing operational simplicity, customer needs, and engineering constraints
Lead the design and implementation of the new tooling, including Operator(s), enabling automated lifecycle management and zero-downtime upgrades
Architect upgrade orchestration systems that safely coordinate complex multi-component upgrades across databases, application services, and auxiliary components
Establish operational maturity standards and guidance for new services being integrated into GitLab's deployment tooling and empowering development teams for the end-to-end of their components
Drive technical decisions around service integration patterns, deployment models, and operational interfaces
Lead complex initiatives overarching multiple groups and be the technical leadership voice that set the direction and drives technical decisions
Platform Engineering & Development
Design production-grade Kubernetes Operators that aims to reliable reconciliation logic for complex stateful applications
Design and implement upgrade orchestration that handles database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback capabilities
Develop tooling and automation to reduce the operational complexity of running GitLab at scale
Create integration frameworks that enable development teams to ship new services with standardized deployment patterns
Maintain and evolve GitLab Helm Charts to support both simple and complex deployment topologies
Database & Application Lifecycle Management
Contribute to safe database migration strategies for zero-downtime upgrades across PostgreSQL and other stateful components
Implement compatibility layers that enable incremental upgrades without requiring simultaneous updates across all components
Design and contribute to build validation and pre-flight check systems that detect potential upgrade issues before they impact production
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Enablement
Partner with development teams to define integration requirements for new services and features
Collaborate with GitLab Dedicated and Gitlab.com SRE teams to align deployment patterns and operational practices
Work with Product Management to translate customer needs into technical requirements
Mentor and guide other engineers on the team, establishing technical standards and best practices
Create technical documentation and runbooks that enable customer success and support teams
Production Operations & Reliability
Define and implement observability standards for self-managed deployments, including metrics, logging, and alerting
Build automated testing frameworks that validate deployment and upgrade scenarios across reference architectures
Establish performance benchmarks and capacity planning guidance for different deployment scales
Design resilience patterns for handling failures during upgrades and operations
Contribute to incident response and post-mortems for self-managed deployment issues
What you'll bring
Required Experience & Skills
8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3+ years in platform engineering or infrastructure roles
Expert-level Go proficiency (Ruby and Rails as a plus) with demonstrated ability to work in large, complex codebases
Production Kubernetes experience, including:
Building and maintaining Kubernetes Operators
Designing Helm charts for complex stateful applications
Understanding of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), admission controllers, and controller patterns
Experience with stateful workloads, persistent volumes, and storage classes
Cloud-native architecture experience, including service mesh, observability stacks, and infrastructure as code
Experience shipping production software that customers install and operate in their own infrastructure
Understanding of Linux systems, including package management, systemd, and system-level debugging
Highly Valued Experience
Experience building or maintaining Operators for complex stateful applications (databases, message queues, etc.)
Ruby on Rails expertise and understanding of Rails application architecture
Infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools
Background in Site Reliability Engineering or DevOps with production on-call experience
Understanding of compliance and security requirements for enterprise software deployments
Experience with observability platforms
Open source contribution history, particularly in infrastructure or deployment tooling
Technical Leadership Qualities
Technical influence and communication: Ability to design holistic solutions balancing multiple constraints, write clear technical proposals and documentation, and work across teams influencing without direct authority
Team development and execution: Track record of mentoring and elevating team capabilities through teaching and code review, combined with pragmatic decision-making and bias for action when facing incomplete information
What Makes You Stand Out
You've built Kubernetes Operators in production and dealt with the operational complexities of stateful workload management
You have deep PostgreSQL expertise, including schema design and migration strategies, replication, backup, and recovery, handling database upgrades with minimal downtime
You have deep experience with database migrations at scale and understand the tradeoffs between downtime and complexity
You've shipped software that customers install on-premises and have felt the pain of upgrade friction firsthand
You contribute to open source infrastructure projects and understand community dynamics
You can explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
You have experience with zero-downtime deployment strategies for monolithic applications transitioning to microservices
You've been on-call for production systems and understand what makes software operable
About the team
The Operate team is part of GitLab Delivery and focuses on delivering GitLab to self-managed users through supported and validated tooling. This includes maintaining and evolving the GitLab Omnibus package, Helm Charts, GitLab Operator, and the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET).
We partner with SRE, Release, Security, and Development teams to ensure GitLab is easily deployable, supportable, and production-ready in diverse environments—from small single-node deployments to large enterprise-scale Kubernetes clusters.
Current challenges we're tackling:
Zero-downtime upgrades: Enabling self-managed customers to upgrade GitLab without service interruption
Operational complexity: Reducing the burden of managing GitLab at scale while expanding our service architecture
Cloud-native transition: Building the next generation of deployment tooling while supporting existing customers
Upgrade velocity: Reducing the time it takes for 80% of self-managed customers to adopt new releases from 7.8 months to 4 months
Team structure:
You'll be joining a newly consolidated Operate team that is building the capability to deliver GitLab's expanding service architecture to self-managed customers. As a Staff engineer, you'll work closely with the engineering manager and product manager to define technical direction while mentoring other engineers on the team.