Staff Backend Engineer, GitLab Delivery: Upgrades

Open 17d

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.