Who you are

• Proven expertise designing and operating distributed systems at massive scale in SaaS or cloud platforms
• Strong background in backend, reliability, or platform engineering, with hands-on experience in Go, Ruby, or similar languages
• Deep understanding of observability, incident response, and strategies for ensuring reliability in complex systems
• Ability to drive alignment across teams and influence senior leaders without formal authority
• Track record of delivering technical outcomes that shaped business direction
• Strong communicator who can simplify complex topics for engineers, executives, and customers alike
• Passion for mentoring and developing senior technical talent

What the job involves

• GitLab.com is one of the largest DevSecOps platforms in the world
• As a Principal Engineer on the Production Engineering team, you will shape how it scales for reliability, performance, and global reach
• This is a career-defining opportunity to guide the technical strategy for GitLab’s multi-tenant SaaS platform, tackling challenges that few companies face at this scale
• You will influence infrastructure decisions across Observability, Disaster Recovery, Fleet Management, and Service Delivery, while partnering with product and executive leadership to align technology with business outcomes
• Your work will set the foundation for how millions of users experience GitLab and how thousands of engineers across the company deliver value
• You'll own the long-term roadmap for Production Engineering, driving modernization and scale initiatives that directly impact GitLab.com availability and performance
• Lead design for complex distributed systems challenges such as sharding, multi-tenant isolation, observability, and failure recovery
• Collaborate with leaders across engineering and product to ensure infrastructure choices deliver both technical and business value
• Anticipate evolving needs at scale and define patterns that make our platform more resilient, efficient, and cost-effective
• Mentor senior and staff engineers, multiplying impact by raising technical excellence across teams
• Champion observability and production readiness practices that improve the speed and quality at which we ship features to customers, along with improving reliability for customers worldwide
• Production Engineering is responsible for the reliability, performance, and scalability of GitLab.com, one of the largest SaaS platforms in the world
• The team builds the infrastructure and practices that keep GitLab.com available and resilient, covering areas such as observability, disaster recovery, fleet management, and service delivery
• Our mission is to ensure every GitLab.com customer benefits from a stable, performant, and production-ready platform
• We partner across engineering to embed reliability into how GitLab ships software while balancing modernization with efficiency and cost-effectiveness
• As part of this team, you will be at the forefront of GitLab.com’s evolution
• You will help guide the strategy for operating at massive scale, solve complex distributed systems challenges, and shape the foundation on which thousands of engineers and millions of users rely every day

Benefits

• We offer benefits to manage your health, wealth, and well-being regardless of location
• Flexibility in schedule to be there for life’s important moments
• Equity compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan offered
• Generous Paid Time Off