An overview of this role

Group Tenant Scale (GTS) is re-architecting GitLab.com into a modern, distributed SaaS platform. Today, GitLab.com runs as a single massive multi-tenant instance. Tomorrow, it will be made up of Cells (self-contained clusters) and Organizations (logical groupings of tenants), supported by OrgMover (seamless migration tooling).

This transformation will make GitLab.com horizontally scalable, resilient, and flexible—so customers of every size experience high reliability, global reach, and freedom to grow with GitLab.

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll shape the technical foundation of GitLab’s future SaaS. You’ll drive the design of distributed systems at scale, influence architectural strategy across engineering, and partner with leaders to align infrastructure with business outcomes. This is career-defining work that impacts every GitLab customer.

What you’ll do

Lead architecture and design for Cells, Organizations and OrgMover, enabling Postgres sharding, zero-downtime migrations, and global SaaS scalability and regionality.
Solve complex distributed systems challenges: tenant isolation, regional distribution, multi-region replication, observability, fault tolerance, and migrations.
Partner across infrastructure, product, and executive teams to ensure our SaaS evolution aligns with both technical excellence and business needs.
Translate architectural tradeoffs into clear direction for engineering managers, senior engineers, and executives.
Mentor and elevate engineers across teams, raising the bar for technical leadership and inclusive collaboration.
Provide thought leadership inside and outside GitLab on SaaS scaling, distributed systems, and platform reliability.

What you’ll bring

Extensive experience designing, developing, migrating, scaling, and operating large distributed systems in a SaaS context.
Hands-on programming experience in Ruby and/or Go, with the ability to dive into code, review implementations, and guide technical design.
Proven track record leading transformations from monolithic to distributed architectures, ideally including Postgres sharding or other database partitioning strategies.
Hands-on expertise with service communication and observability at scale (e.g. service mesh/Istio, Kafka, tracing/metrics).
Principal-level technical leadership: ability to set strategy, influence across organizations, and mentor principal and senior engineers.
Balance of infrastructure depth and application architecture awareness; skilled at making system-level tradeoffs that prioritize reliability and customer experience.
Excellent communication skills; able to make complex systems understandable to technical and non-technical audiences.
Bonus: Experience in regulated or high-reliability domains (finance, healthcare, government, telecom).

About the team

Group Tenant Scale (GTS) is re-architecting GitLab.com into the next-generation multi-tenant SaaS platform. It will be horizontally scalable, reliable, and flexible. We are building this through Cells (infrastructure-level sharding), Organizations (application-level tenant grouping), and extensions of Geo to enable replication and cross-platform migrations.

Our goal is to give every customer a rock-solid experience: high availability, strong resiliency, global performance, and the ability to move seamlessly between multi-tenant and single-tenant offerings as their needs evolve.

What began as a small team tackling foundational projects has grown into dedicated engineering groups, including Geo, that are working together to deliver the future of GitLab’s multi-tenant platform.

As part of this team, you will be at the center of one of the most impactful transformations in GitLab’s history. You will help reshape GitLab.com into a cloud-scale SaaS platform that powers the next decade of growth, while collaborating with some of the best engineers in distributed systems, mentoring others, and leaving a lasting architectural legacy.

Principal Software Engineer, Group Tenant Scale

Anywhere in the world

Remote

Senior

GitLab