Staff Backend Engineer, Gitlab Delivery: Upgrades

The role is responsible for driving the technical direction of deployment and upgrade solutions, ensuring reliability, scalability, and operational excellence for self-managed environments. The position requires strong ownership of backend engineering initiatives, collaboration across teams, and the ability to solve complex infrastructure challenges.

• Define technical strategies and architecture for cloud-native deployment, upgrade workflows, and self-managed platform solutions.
• Design, develop, and maintain backend systems, automation frameworks, and deployment tooling using modern engineering practices.
• Build and improve Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and orchestration solutions for stateful applications.
• Develop automation for database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility validation, and rollback processes.
• Establish best practices for reliability, observability, testing, performance, and resilience.
• Contribute to improving upgrade experiences by reducing operational complexity and minimizing service disruption.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, security, and reliability teams to align solutions with customer needs.
• Mentor engineers through technical guidance, code reviews, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Support incident response activities, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Requirements:

The ideal candidate brings extensive backend engineering experience, strong knowledge of cloud-native technologies, and the ability to guide technical decisions in complex production environments.

• Strong professional experience designing and delivering production-grade software systems.
• Advanced experience with Go development for large and complex codebases.
• Experience with Kubernetes in production environments, including Operators, Helm charts, Custom Resource Definitions, and controller patterns.
• Knowledge of cloud-native architectures, infrastructure automation, observability solutions, and DevOps practices.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or Ansible.
• Experience managing stateful applications and databases, including PostgreSQL migrations, storage solutions, and reliability strategies.
• Strong understanding of Linux systems, production operations, debugging, monitoring, and incident management.
• Experience with distributed systems, scalability, high availability, and fault-tolerant architectures.
• Ability to create technical proposals, document decisions, and influence teams through collaboration.
• Familiarity with Ruby on Rails and application architecture is a plus.
• Experience with open-source infrastructure or deployment tooling is highly desirable.
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• Ability to work effectively in remote, asynchronous, and globally distributed teams.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation package.
• Flexible remote work environment.
• Benefits designed to support health, financial security, and overall well-being.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Employee resource groups supporting diversity, inclusion, and community building.
• Equity compensation and employee stock purchase opportunities.
• Professional growth and development programs.
• Parental leave support.
• Opportunity to work with innovative technologies and globally distributed engineering teams.