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 Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being All remote, asynchronous work environment Flexible Paid Time Off Team Member Resource Groups Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan Growth and development budget  Parental leave  Home office support

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.