Staff Engineer, GitLab Delivery - Operate

About the 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 high-impact technical leadership role involves architecting and implementing systems that enable thousands of organizations to reliably deploy, upgrade, and operate GitLab in their own infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• 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 new tooling, including Kubernetes Operators, 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.
• Drive technical decisions around service integration patterns, deployment models, and operational interfaces.
• Design production-grade Kubernetes Operators with 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3+ years in platform engineering or infrastructure roles.
• Expert-level Go proficiency 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.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Ruby and Rails.