Senior Backend (Go) Engineer, Gitlab Delivery - Operate

An overview of this role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the GitLab Operate team you’ll focus on delivering and supporting GitLab for self-managed customers by building and maintaining the infrastructure tooling and automation that power our deployment options. You’ll work across Omnibus GitLab GitLab Helm Charts the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET) and the GitLab Operator to ensure GitLab is easy to deploy secure by default and scalable across diverse environments and major cloud providers. In this role you’ll act as a bridge between GitLab engineering and self-managed customers shaping production-grade deployment tooling improving installation and upgrade experiences and collaborating with teams like Distribution SRE Release Security and Development to keep GitLab’s features reliably delivered and operable on supported platforms.

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 and contribute to the design development and maintenance of GitLab Helm Charts so they reliably integrate all core components and support scalable production-ready self-managed deployments.

• Enhance and extend the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET) validated reference architectures and the GitLab Operator to provide secure scalable Kubernetes-native lifecycle management for GitLab deployments used by enterprise and internal customers.

• Improve installation upgrade and day-to-day operations workflows across all supported platforms to ensure a consistent reliable experience.

• Partner with Security to address vulnerabilities in the deployment stack and deliver secure defaults and configurations.

• Build and maintain automation and CI/CD pipelines that validate and test deployment tools across Omnibus Charts GET and the Operator.

• Collaborate with Distribution Engineers SREs Release Managers and Development teams to integrate new features into deployment methods and keep them reliable.

• Create and maintain clear user-focused documentation and implementation guides that help self-managed customers deploy and operate GitLab with confidence.

• Provide technical leadership by guiding architectural decisions for deployment tooling mentoring backend engineers and contributing to the strategic roadmap for self-managed delivery.

What you’ll bring

• Experience running backend services in production environments including deploying monitoring and operating systems built on Kubernetes and Helm.

• Advanced proficiency with Go for building and maintaining observable resilient services with an ability to work in Ruby as a plus.

• Hands-on practice with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform and managing infrastructure across major cloud providers like GCP AWS or Azure.

• Practical experience designing operating and troubleshooting databases especially PostgreSQL in secure and scalable setups.

• Understanding of secure scalable and supportable deployment practices including service scaling and rollout strategies.

• Familiarity with observability tools and patterns such as Prometheus and Grafana to track system health and performance.

• Experience collaborating within large codebases and working effectively with distributed cross-functional teams.

• Ability to write clear user-focused documentation and implementation guides and openness to applying transferable skills from related backend or infrastructure roles.

About the team

The Operate team sits within GitLab Delivery. We're a globally distributed all-remote group that works closely with Site Reliability Engineers Release Security and Development across regions in an asynchronous way. We focus on collaboration iteration and helping self-managed customers run GitLab successfully in their own environments from small business to large enterprise. For more on how we work see Team Handbook Page and Related Initiative .