Staff Backend Engineer, GitLab Delivery: Upgrades

You will guide the technical direction for cloud-native, self-managed GitLab deployments and upgrades. You will design and maintain Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and orchestration tooling; develop automation for migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollbacks; improve observability, testing, performance, and resilience; and mentor engineers through reviews, documentation, and runbooks.

Responsibilities

• Guide the technical vision and architecture for cloud-native self-managed deployments and upgrade workflows.
• Establish operational maturity standards, service integration patterns, and deployment models.
• Design and maintain Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tooling.
• Develop automation and integration frameworks for database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback paths.
• Define database and application lifecycle strategies, including PostgreSQL migration and validation approaches.
• Align deployment patterns with customer needs across product, reliability, and development partners.
• Mentor engineers and enable customer-facing teams through reviews, documentation, and runbooks.
• Drive observability, testing, performance, and resilience practices, and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning.

Requirements

• Software engineering experience designing and delivering production systems for customer-operated infrastructure.
• Proficiency in Go for large, complex codebases.
• Hands-on production Kubernetes experience, including Operators, Helm charts, Custom Resource Definitions, admission controllers, and controller patterns.
• Knowledge of cloud-native systems and tooling, including service mesh, observability, infrastructure as code, Terraform, or Ansible.
• Experience with stateful workloads and databases, including PostgreSQL schema design and migrations, persistent volumes, storage classes, and downtime reduction during upgrades.
• Understanding of Linux systems and production operations, including package management, systemd, debugging, observability, incident response, and on-call participation.
• Ability to write technical proposals, document decisions, mentor engineers, and work across teams.
• Interest in open-source infrastructure or deployment tooling, or transferable adjacent-domain experience.

Benefits

• Health, financial, and well-being benefits.
• Flexible Paid Time Off.
• Team Member Resource Groups.
• Equity compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Growth and Development Fund.
• Parental Leave.