Backend Engineer, GitLab Delivery - Operate

An overview of this role

As a Backend Engineer, your work within the GitLab Operate team will focus on delivering and supporting GitLab for self-managed customers. This role centers on the infrastructure, tooling, and automation that power GitLab deployments via Omnibus, GitLab Helm Charts, the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET), and the GitLab Operator.

The GitLab Operate team serves as a critical bridge between GitLab engineering and our self-managed customers, ensuring our products are easily deployable, secure, and scalable across a range of environments. You’ll work on production-grade tooling and collaborate with engineering teams to ensure GitLab’s features are consistently delivered and operable across supported platforms.

Some interesting links about the team and role:

Our primary projects
Our work with the community
Our Demo videos

What you’ll do

Omnibus GitLab: Maintain and evolve the GitLab Omnibus package to ensure it reliably integrates all GitLab components and can be deployed in self-managed environments.
Kubernetes Charts: Contribute to the development and maintenance of GitLab Helm Charts, enabling scalable and production-ready GitLab deployments on Kubernetes.
GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET): Enhance and support the toolkit used to deploy validated GitLab reference architectures for enterprise and internal use cases.
GitLab Operator: Support the GitLab Operator project to enable Kubernetes-native lifecycle management for GitLab deployments.
Installation and Upgrade Experience: Ensure a consistent and reliable experience for installing, upgrading, and operating GitLab across all supported platforms.
Security Collaboration: Partner with Security to address vulnerabilities in the deployment stack and ensure secure defaults and configurations.
Automation & CI/CD: Build and maintain automation pipelines for validating and testing deployment tools across Omnibus, Charts, GET, and the Operator.
Cross-Team Integration: Work closely with Distribution Engineers, SREs, Release Managers, and Development teams to ensure smooth integration of new features into our deployment methods.
Documentation & Enablement: Create and maintain user-focused documentation that enables self-managed customers to confidently deploy and operate GitLab.
Reliability: Ensure all supported deployment methods are well-tested and meet GitLab’s standards for quality, reliability, and performance.

What you’ll bring

Production experience working with Kubernetes and Helm
Professional proficiency in Ruby, Go and strong Bash scripting skills
Experience with Terraform and infrastructure as code workflows
Practical experience working with databases, especially PostgreSQL
Understanding of secure, scalable, and supportable deployment practices
Experience collaborating in large codebases and across distributed teams
Ability to write clear, user-facing documentation and implementation guides
Experience with major cloud providers (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure)
Knowledge of service scaling and rollout strategies
Knowledge of Observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, etc)

About the team

The Operate team is part of GitLab Delivery and focuses on delivering GitLab to self-managed users through supported and validated tooling. This includes maintaining and evolving the GitLab Omnibus package, Helm Charts, GitLab Operator, and the GitLab Environment Toolkit (GET). We partner with SRE, Release, Security, and Development teams to ensure GitLab is easily deployable, supportable, and production-ready in diverse environments. Our work directly supports GitLab’s commitment to reliability and flexibility for small business through enterprise scale, self-managed installations.

How GitLab will support you

Intermediate Backend (Ruby or Go) Engineer, Gitlab Delivery - Operate

Anywhere in the world

Remote

Mid-level

GitLab