An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the GitLab Upgrades team, you’ll help self-managed customers run GitLab reliably by building and maintaining the infrastructure, tooling, and automation behind our deployment options. You’ll work across Omnibus GitLab, GitLab Helm Charts, the GitLab Environment Toolkit (Get), and the GitLab Operator to make GitLab easier to deploy, more secure by default, and scalable across major cloud providers and a wide range of customer environments. In this role, you’ll partner closely with engineering teams and act as a bridge to customer needs, improving installation, upgrade, and day-to-day operations for production-grade GitLab deployments.

Some examples of our projects:

• Evolving Omnibus GitLab, Helm Charts, GET, and the GitLab Operator to support validated reference architectures for enterprise-scale deployments
• Building automation pipelines and observability into deployment tooling to validate, test, and operate GitLab across Kubernetes and other self-managed environments

What you’ll do

• Maintain and evolve the Omnibus GitLab package to support reliable, production-ready self-managed deployments, improving deployment stability, increasing upgrade success rates, and reducing escalation rates.
• Develop and improve GitLab Helm Charts so core components integrate cleanly and scale across supported environments, reducing deployment friction, shortening time to deploy, and improving operational consistency at scale.
• Enhance the GitLab Environment Toolkit (Get), validated reference architectures, and the GitLab Operator for secure, Kubernetes-native lifecycle management, improving reliability, strengthening security baselines, and accelerating adoption in customer environments.
• Improve installation, upgrade, and operational workflows across deployment methods to create a consistent experience for self-managed customers, reducing operational overhead, lowering failure rates, and increasing consistency across deployment methods.
• Partner with Security to address vulnerabilities and deliver secure defaults and configurations in the deployment stack, reducing exposure to vulnerabilities and improving baseline security across self-managed deployments.
• Build and maintain automation and continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that validate and test Omnibus, Charts, Get, and the Operator, increasing release confidence, improving test coverage, and reducing regressions across deployment tooling.
• Work closely with Distribution Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Release Managers, and Development teams to integrate new features into deployment methods and keep them reliable, scalable, and aligned with customer needs, improving delivery readiness and reducing operational issues after release.
• Guide architectural direction, mentor backend engineers, and contribute to the roadmap for self-managed delivery, improving technical quality, accelerating delivery effectiveness, and strengthening team execution.

What you’ll bring

• Experience operating backend services in production, including deployment, monitoring, and maintenance in Kubernetes- and Helm-based environments.
• Proficiency in Go for building observable and resilient services, with working knowledge of Ruby as a useful addition.
• Hands-on practice with infrastructure as code, including tools such as Terraform, and with managing infrastructure across cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure.
• Knowledge of database design, operations, and troubleshooting, especially for PostgreSQL in secure and scalable setups.
• Knowledge of secure, scalable, and reliable deployment practices, including service scaling and rollout strategies.
• Familiarity with observability tools and patterns such as Prometheus and Grafana to monitor system health and performance.
• Ability to work effectively in large codebases and coordinate across distributed, cross-functional teams using clear written communication.
• Openness to transferable experience from related backend or infrastructure roles, along with the ability to write user-focused documentation and implementation guides.

About the team

The Upgrades team is part of GitLab Delivery and focuses on helping self-managed customers run GitLab successfully in their own environments, from smaller deployments to large enterprise footprints. We own deployment and operational tooling across our work on Omnibus GitLab, Helm Charts, Get, and the GitLab Operator, and we work as a globally distributed, all-remote group that works asynchronously with Site Reliability Engineering, Release, Security, and Development teams across regions. We are focused on making self-managed GitLab easier to deploy, upgrade, secure, and operate at scale. For more on how we work, see Team Handbook Page.