Staff Backend Engineer, Gitlab Delivery: Upgrades

ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Engineer to guide the technical direction for GitLab's self-managed deployment strategy. As a key member of the GitLab Delivery - Upgrades team, you will work closely with engineering managers, product managers, 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. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Engineer, you will be responsible for: - Guiding the technical vision and architecture for GitLab's cloud-native, self-managed deployments and upgrade workflows - Establishing operational maturity standards, service integration patterns, and deployment models that help development teams manage the lifecycle of their components - Designing and maintaining Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and upgrade orchestration tooling for self-managed GitLab deployments across varied environments - Developing automation and integration frameworks for database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback paths - Defining database and application lifecycle strategies, including safe PostgreSQL migration approaches and validation mechanisms that reduce downtime risk - Collaborating with Product Management, GitLab.com Site Reliability Engineering, GitLab Dedicated, and development teams to align deployment patterns with customer needs - Mentoring engineers and enabling customer-facing teams through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and runbooks - Driving observability, testing, performance, and resilience practices for self-managed deployments, and contributing to incident response and post-incident learning WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need: - 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 packaging and deployment strategies WHY REMOTE GitLab is a fully remote company, and this role will be performed remotely. As a remote employee, you will have the flexibility to work from anywhere, at any time, as long as you have a stable internet connection and the necessary equipment to perform your job duties. BENEFITS GitLab offers a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package, including: - Competitive salary - Comprehensive health insurance - 401(k) matching program - Flexible vacation policy - Professional development opportunities - Access to cutting-edge technology and tools - Collaborative and dynamic work environment