Staff Engineer, GitLab Delivery - Operate

An overview of this role

As a Staff Engineer within the GitLab Operate team, you'll 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

• Lead the technical vision and architecture for GitLab's cloud-native, self-managed deployments and zero-downtime upgrades, balancing operational simplicity, customer needs, and engineering constraints to improve upgrade success rates and reduce customer downtime
• Establish and champion operational maturity standards, service integration patterns, and deployment models; provide cross-group technical leadership on complex initiatives so development teams can own the end-to-end lifecycle of their components while reducing upgrade risk and operational complexity

Platform Engineering & Development

• Design, implement, and maintain production-grade Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tooling that automate lifecycle management for self-managed GitLab deployments at varying scales, reducing manual operations and configuration errors
• Develop integration and automation frameworks that handle database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollbacks, enabling product teams to ship new services with standardized deployment patterns and predictable release outcomes

Database & Application Lifecycle Management

• Define and evolve database and application lifecycle strategies—including safe PostgreSQL migrations, compatibility layers, and pre-flight/validation checks—to minimize downtime, failed upgrades, and rollback frequency across self-managed environments

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Enablement

• Collaborate with Product Management, GitLab.com SRE, GitLab Dedicated, and development teams to define integration requirements, align deployment patterns and operational practices, and translate customer needs into scalable self-managed solutions
• Mentor and enable engineers and customer-facing teams through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and runbooks that improve deployment reliability, supportability, and customer success

Production Operations & Reliability

• Define and implement observability, testing, performance, and resilience practices for self-managed deployments—including metrics, logging, alerting, benchmarks, capacity guidance, and failure-handling patterns—and contribute to incident response and post-mortems to continuously improve reliability, upgrade success rates, and mean time to recovery (MTTR)

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 (Strong Plus)

• You've built Kubernetes Operators in production and dealt with the operational complexities of stateful workload management
• You have PostgreSQL knowledge, including schema design and experience with database migrations at scale and understand the tradeoffs between downtime and complexity
• You've shipped cloud native software that customers can run on-premises
• 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 self-managed customers to adopt new releases

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.