Staff Backend Engineer

Role Overview

We are seeking a visionary Staff Backend Engineer for the GitLab Delivery: Upgrades team in Bengaluru East, India (hybrid/remote eligible).

The Company

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. Trusted by over 50 million registered users and more than half of Fortune 100 companies to ship better software faster.

Your Mission: GitLab Delivery - Upgrades Team

You will guide the technical direction for GitLab's self-managed deployment strategy, ensuring customers can deploy, upgrade, and run GitLab reliably with minimal disruption. Serving as a technical anchor, you will shape cloud-native, operator-driven patterns that reduce operational complexity.

• Define architecture for zero-downtime upgrades across complex stateful installations (Evolving the GitLab Operator).
• Simplify large-scale production deployments via the Environment Toolkit and Helm charts.

Your Responsibilities

• Guide technical vision, operational maturity standards, service integration patterns, and deployment models for self-managed environments.
• Maintain Kubernetes Operators and upgrade orchestration tooling across varied infrastructures (Linux/Cloud).
• Develop automation frameworks for database migrations (PostgreSQL), rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback paths to minimize risk.
• Mentor engineers through design/code reviews, documentation, and runbooks.

What You'll Bring

• Expert proficiency in Go; familiarity with Ruby on Rails is a strong plus.
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience: Operators, Helm charts for stateful apps, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), admission controllers, and controller patterns.
• Solid knowledge of observability stacks, service mesh, IaC (Terraform/Ansible).
• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL schema design/migrations and persistent volumes to ensure high availability during upgrades.