Site Reliability Engineer, Intermediate to Senior Staff — Infrastructure Platforms

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster. 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.

An Overview Of This Role

Site Reliability Engineers keep GitLab's user‑facing services and production systems running reliably at scale. They combine software engineering with operational excellence, applying sound engineering principles, automation, and continuous improvement to build, operate, and evolve our production infrastructure. This is a single application for Site Reliability Engineering opportunities across our Infrastructure Platforms department. Rather than asking you to choose the right team or level upfront, we evaluate your skills holistically and match you to the opportunity that best aligns with your experience and our hiring needs. We hire Site Reliability Engineers from Intermediate through Senior Staff across multiple Infrastructure Platforms teams. We don't expect every candidate to have experience with every technology in our environment. We're looking for engineers with strong technical fundamentals, a growth mindset, and the ability to learn quickly. We'll support you in becoming successful with GitLab's tools, systems, and ways of working.

How Our SRE Hiring Works

• Recruiter Screen: A conversation about your background, what you're looking for, and the level and teams that fit, so we can point your process in the right direction.
• Core Technical: The shared assessment every SRE candidate takes, regardless of eventual team. A low‑stress, collaborative discussion covering source code, system architecture, and incident review.
• Peer Technical: Team‑specific depth, run by SREs from the team you’re most likely to join, focused on the problems that team actually works on.
• Hiring Manager Interview: A conversation about ownership, judgment, execution, collaboration, and growth, the non‑technical signals that make an SRE effective at GitLab.
• Skip‑Level Interview: A conversation with a senior leader on values alignment, and how you’ll work across teams.

What level am I?

• Intermediate: You make meaningful contributions to reliability, automation, and operational efficiency, working independently within a scoped area. You diagnose issues on your own, understand system dependencies, and can explain the tradeoffs you made. You prioritize well, break work into manageable steps, and use automation to reduce toil. You document your work clearly and keep yourself moving without needing check‑ins.
• Senior: You drive reliability improvements across multiple projects or services and prioritize them based on real system needs. You lead investigations, anticipate cascading failures, and coordinate incident response. You own delivery end to end, unblock others, and improve the patterns your team works by. You communicate complex ideas clearly, influence how work gets done, and enable coordination across teams.
• Staff: You shape reliability strategy across teams and services and define patterns that others reuse. You introduce prevention strategies, identify systemic weaknesses, and influence incident response practices beyond your immediate area. You design execution and automation approaches that work at organizational scale. You connect reliability work to platform and business needs.
• Senior Staff: You set technical direction for reliability across a sub‑department, not just a team. You drive the hardest, most ambiguous systems problems and establish standards and guardrails that multiple teams adopt. You mentor Staff and Senior engineers. You align reliability strategy with long‑range platform direction and represent Infrastructure's interests across the wider Engineering organization.

What You’ll Do

• Keep user‑facing services and production systems reliable, scalable, and efficient.
• Build automation and tooling that reduces toil and replaces manual work with repeatable, infrastructure‑as‑code‑driven workflows.
• Operate and troubleshoot production systems on Kubernetes, including deployments, rollouts, and scaling.
• Write and maintain infrastructure as code, and ship changes safely through CI/CD and GitOps.
• Participate in on‑call, triage alerts, follow and improve runbooks, and elevate appropriately.
• Contribute to the observability stack, using metrics, logs, and SLOs to detect symptoms early rather than just outages.
• Take part in incident response and post‑incident reviews, turning learnings into changes in automation and process.
• Document runbooks, architecture decisions, and reviews so your findings become repeatable practices.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience keeping production systems reliable, combining an operations mindset with real software engineering practice.
• Experience building net‑new infrastructure tooling and automation, not just configuring existing tools. For example, Terraform modules, Kubernetes operators or controllers, or production automation and services written from scratch.
• The ability to read, debug, and reason about code. Most of our teams work in Go; some work in Ruby. You can discuss a piece of code’s behavior, performance, and failure modes.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, and with Kubernetes and its ecosystem, at a depth appropriate to your level.
• Hands‑on experience with at least one major cloud provider (GCP or AWS).
• Familiarity with observability practices, including metrics, logging, alerting, and SLOs or SLIs, and using data to inform operational decisions.
• Comfort participating in on‑call and incident response, with a structured approach to troubleshooting under pressure.
• Strong written communication and the ability to operate as a manager‑of‑one in an async, distributed environment.
• A track record of using automation, and increasingly AI, to reduce toil and improve how you and your team work.
• Alignment with GitLab’s values and a commitment to working in accordance with them.

About The Team

Infrastructure Platforms is responsible for the availability, reliability, performance, and scalability of GitLab’s user‑facing services, most notably GitLab.com. The department spans sub‑departments including Production Engineering and Dedicated, and the teams within them own everything from the production fleet and networking platform to observability, incident response, and our single‑tenant Dedicated offering. We are a globally distributed, all‑remote group that works asynchronously, favors automation over toil, and closes the loop with monitoring and metrics to drive accountability.

How GitLab Supports Full‑Time Employees

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well‑being.
• Flexible Paid Time Off.
• Team Member Resource Groups.
• Equity Compensation.

GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics.