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DevOps, Software Development Tools, SaaS

Staff Backend Engineer, Gitlab Delivery: Upgrades

IndiaRemoteFull TimeStaffPosted 2 months ago

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Role summary

As a Staff Backend Engineer on the GitLab Delivery - Upgrades team, you will lead the technical strategy for GitLab's self-managed deployment and upgrade processes. Your primary focus will be on ensuring customers can deploy and upgrade GitLab reliably with minimal disruption. You will architect solutions for zero-downtime upgrades, enhance observability and reliability, and drive the evolution of deployment automation. This role involves designing and maintaining Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and related tooling, with a strong emphasis on Go programming, Kubernetes, and stateful database management. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, mentor engineers, and influence technical direction through clear communication and documentation.

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

*Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

An overview of this role

As a Staff Engineer on the GitLab Delivery - Upgrades team, you’ll guide the technical direction for GitLab’s self-managed deployment strategy so customers can deploy, upgrade, and run GitLab reliably in their own infrastructure with minimal disruption. You’ll serve as a technical anchor for the team, working closely with your engineering manager, product manager, and partners across Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development to shape cloud-native, operator-driven deployment patterns that reduce operational complexity and upgrade friction. In your first year, you’ll help define the architecture for zero-downtime upgrades, strengthen observability and reliability practices, and guide the next generation of deployment automation for self-managed GitLab environments.

Some examples of our projects:

Evolving GitLab Operator and Helm charts to support zero-downtime upgrades for complex, stateful GitLab installations

Advancing the GitLab Environment Toolkit to simplify large-scale, production-ready self-managed deployments

What you’ll do

Guide the technical vision and architecture for GitLab’s cloud-native, self-managed deployments and upgrade workflows.

Establish operational maturity standards, service integration patterns, and deployment models that help development teams manage the lifecycle of their components.

Design and maintain Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tooling for self-managed GitLab deployments across varied environments.

Develop automation and integration frameworks for database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback paths.

Define database and application lifecycle strategies, including safe PostgreSQL migration approaches and validation mechanisms that reduce downtime risk.

Work with Product Management, GitLab.com Site Reliability Engineering, GitLab Dedicated, and development teams to align deployment patterns with customer needs.

Mentor engineers and enable customer-facing teams through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and runbooks.

Drive observability, testing, performance, and resilience practices for self-managed deployments, and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning.

What you’ll bring

Strong software engineering experience designing and delivering production systems that customers install and operate in their own infrastructure.

Proficiency in Go for large, complex codebases, with familiarity with Ruby on Rails and Rails application architecture as a useful addition.

Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production, including building and maintaining Operators, designing Helm charts for stateful applications, and working with Custom Resource Definitions, admission controllers, and controller patterns.

Knowledge of cloud-native systems and tooling, such as service mesh, observability stacks, infrastructure as code, and automation tools like Terraform or Ansible.

Experience with stateful workloads and databases, including PostgreSQL schema design and migrations, persistent volumes, storage classes, and approaches for reducing downtime during upgrades.

Understanding of Linux systems and production operations, including package management, systemd, system-level debugging, observability, incident response, and on-call participation.

Ability to guide through influence, including writing clear technical proposals, documenting decisions, mentoring engineers, and working effectively across teams.

Interest in open source infrastructure or deployment tooling, or transferable experience from adjacent domains, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to different audiences.

About the team

The Delivery - Upgrades team sits within GitLab Delivery and focuses on delivering GitLab to self-managed users through supported, validated deployment tooling. We own and evolve the GitLab Omnibus package, Helm charts, GitLab Operator, and the GitLab Environment Toolkit, and we work asynchronously across regions with partners in Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development. Our work centers on enabling zero-downtime upgrades, reducing operational complexity at scale, supporting GitLab’s cloud-native transition while continuing to serve existing deployments, and improving the upgrade experience for customers running GitLab in diverse environments. For more on how we work, see [Link: Team Handbook Page].

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being

Flexible Paid Time Off

Team Member Resource Groups

Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Growth and Development Fund

Parental leave

Home office support

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.

Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.

GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.

Sample GitLab interview questions

1
Design a system for managing distributed data migrations.
system designmedium
2
Reverse Nodes in k-Group Reverse nodes in k-group in a linked list. Input: head = [1,2,3,4,5], k = 3 Output: [3,2,1,4,5] Explanation: The first 3 elements are reversed, while the remaining 2 are left untouched since they don't form a complete group.
codingmedium
3
Maximum Depth of an N-ary Tree Find the maximum depth of an N-ary tree. Input: root = [1,null,2,null,3,null,4] Output: 4 Explanation: The tree is essentially a straight line, requiring a traversal that reaches a maximum depth of 4 layers.
codingmedium
4
Find the minimum path sum from top-left to bottom-right in a grid.
codingmedium
5
Find the longest substring with at most two distinct characters.
codingmedium

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