Principal Database Engineer

About the Role

As a Principal Database Engineer, you will architect the data platform foundation powering GitLab.com and thousands of enterprise deployments worldwide. This is a unique opportunity to design and build industry-leading database systems that will enable GitLab's next phase of exponential growth and establish new gold standards for database development and operations.

Responsibilities

• Lead database architecture and strategy for GitLab.com's PostgreSQL infrastructure, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance for hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
• Develop proactive database health and reliability frameworks, leveraging continuous monitoring, automated remediation, and predictive analytics to prevent incidents.
• Drive database excellence across engineering teams by establishing best practices, providing expert guidance on migrations and query optimization, and building self-service tools.
• Own end-to-end observability and operational excellence, designing symptom-based monitoring and leading incident mitigation efforts.
• Shape GitLab's database platform evolution by evaluating and implementing modern database technologies and data stores.
• Design multi-platform solutions that scale for both GitLab.com and self-managed customers.
• Foster strong partnerships between product and infrastructure teams to align strategic decisions.
• Contribute to the codebase to maintain technical credibility and team empathy.

Requirements

• Extensive experience architecting, operating, and optimizing PostgreSQL in large-scale distributed systems with high availability and disaster recovery.
• 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 and monitoring.
• Strong advocacy for infrastructure-as-code, GitOps practices, security hardening, and SRE principles in database operations.
• Ability to debug across the full stack, from low-level systems (Postgres, Elasticsearch) to frontend (TypeScript).
• Strong hands-on coding skills, balancing strategic leadership with technical execution.
• Demonstrated ability to influence organizational adoption of modern database technologies and data stack solutions.

Role Impact and Challenges

• Design solutions for uncontrolled data growth while maintaining performance and cost efficiency.
• Address critical customer pain points related to database upgrades and migrations.
• Create a sustainable operational model that scales with growth without linear headcount increases.
• Build the foundation for GitLab's next-generation data architecture, including sharding and multi-database support.
• Transform the database incident response strategy from reactive to a proactive platform organization.