GitLab is an open-core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating human progress. Our platform unites teams and organizations, breaking down barriers and redefining what’s possible in software development. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise and Duo Agent Platform, customers get AI benefits at every stage of the SDLC.
The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION:

• Ability to thrive in a fully remote, asynchronous work environment that places a high emphasis on documentation and written communication.
• Develop expertise in a domain and radiate that knowledge
• Participate in blameless RCAs on incidents and outages, looking for answers that will prevent the incident from ever happening again.

AN OVERVIEW OF THIS ROLE

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are responsible for keeping all user-facing services and other GitLab production systems running smoothly. SREs are a blend of pragmatic operators and software craftspeople that apply sound engineering principles, operational discipline, and mature automation to our environments and the GitLab codebase. We specialize in systems, whether it be networking, the Linux kernel, or some more specific interest in scaling, algorithms, or distributed systems.
The Database Operations team’s mission is to build, run, own and evolve the entire lifecycle of the PostgreSQL database engine for GitLab.com. The team is focused on owning the reliability, scalability, evolution, performance & security of the database engine and its supporting services. The team should be seeking to build their services on top of Reliability::Foundations services and cloud vendor managed products, where appropriate, to reduce complexity, improve efficiency and deliver new capabilities quicker.
GitLab.com is a unique site and it brings unique challenges–it’s the biggest GitLab instance in existence. In fact, it’s one of the largest single-tenancy open-source SaaS sites on the internet. The experience of our team feeds back into other engineering groups within the company, as well as to GitLab customers running self-managed installations

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Automating every operational task is a core requirement for this role. For example, package updates, configuration changes across all environments, creating tools for automatic provisioning of user facing services, etc.
• Responding to platform emergencies, alerts, and escalations from Customer Support.
• Ensure systems exist to manage software life-cycles (e.g. Operating Systems) with a minimum of manual effort.
• Develop a fully automated multi-environment observability stack based on the existing SaaS system, and extend it to predict capacity needs based on the usage patterns.
• Plan for new service roll-outs, expansion and capacity management of existing services, and work with users to optimize their resource consumption.

YOU MAY BE A FIT TO THIS ROLE IF YOU:

• Have primary experience running PostgreSQL in high-growth, large production environments using both self-managed (VM, Kubernetes with modern PostgreSQL Operators) as well DBaaS services.
• Have hands-on experience using data from PostgreSQL internals to design, build and troubleshoot systems.
• Have primary experience with infrastructure automation, orchestration and configuration management (Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform)
• Have solid understanding of SQL and PL/pgSQL
• Significant experience working in a Large SaaS distributed Systems production environment
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
• Have excellent written and verbal English communication skills, with an urge to collaborate and communicate asynchronously.
• Have an urge to document all the things so you don’t need to learn the same thing twice, and an urge for delivering quickly and iterating fast.
• Have a proactive, go-for-it attitude. When you see something broken, you can’t help but fix it
• Solid data modeling and data structure design skills
• Bonus: Solid programming skills as a (former) backend engineer - Preferably with Ruby and/or Go.
• Bonus: Experience with Clickhouse, or other modern OLAP database.