Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Tenant Services: Geo

Job Title: Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Tenant Services: Geo

We are looking for a skilled Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our Tenant Services, Geo team. As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of our user-facing services and production systems.

About Us

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. It enables organisations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation.

Responsibilities

• Execute Dedicated Geo migrations and cutovers end-to-end, including planning, pre-cutover validation, execution, and post-cutover verification and cleanup.
• Join the team's shift and weekend coverage rotation for Dedicated cutovers across EMEA and US hours, and participate in the SaaS Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) on-call rotation to respond to incidents that impact GitLab.com availability.
• Operate and improve the Geo operational surface for Dedicated, including:
• Environment preparation and data hygiene checks prior to migrations.
• Execution of replication, validation, and cutover procedures.
• Handling Geo-related escalations from Support and internal partners.
• Design, build, and maintain automation, tooling, and runbooks that make migrations, cutovers, and Geo escalations as 'boring' and repeatable as possible.
• Run our infrastructure with tools such as Ansible, Chef, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, and Kubernetes; contribute improvements back to GitLab's product and infrastructure where appropriate.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and dashboards that:
• Detect symptoms early, not just outages.
• Track migration and cutover success rates, duration, rollback frequency, and related SLOs.
• Collaborate closely with:
• The core Geo team on improving Geo features and operability.
• Dedicated migrations and Support on migration planning, customer communications, and escalation handling.
• Other Infrastructure teams on capacity planning, disaster recovery, and reliability improvements.
• Contribute to readiness reviews, incident reviews, and root cause analyses, turning learnings into changes in automation, process, or product.
• Document every action, including runbooks, architecture decisions, and post-incident reviews, so your findings turn into repeatable practices and automation.
• Proactively identify and reduce toil by automating repetitive operational work and simplifying migration workflows.

Requirements

• Experience operating highly-available distributed systems at scale, ideally in a SaaS environment with customer-facing SLAs.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (e.g., Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services), including networking, storage, and managed services.
• Experience with Kubernetes and its ecosystem (e.g., Helm), including deploying and troubleshooting workloads.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Chef.
• Strong programming skills in at least one general-purpose language (preferably Go or Ruby) and proficiency with scripting (e.g., Shell, Python).
• Experience with observability systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, logging stacks) and using metrics and logs to troubleshoot performance and reliability issues.
• Practical exposure to data replication, backup/restore, or migration scenarios (e.g., database replication, storage replication, or Geo-like technologies) where data integrity and downtime risk must be carefully managed.
• Comfort participating in an on-call rotation, investigating incidents across the stack, and driving follow-through on corrective actions.
• Ability to engage directly with enterprise customers during migrations and incidents, including on live calls and through clear written updates.
• Ability to clearly define problems, propose options, and think beyond immediate fixes to improve systems and processes over time.
• Ability to be a 'manager of one': self-directed, organized, and able to drive work to completion in a remote, asynchronous environment.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a bias toward clear, asynchronous documentation and collaboration.
• Alignment with our company values and a commitment to working in accordance with those values.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with disaster recovery technologies.
• Experience with managed/hosted environments similar to GitLab Dedicated, including regulated or compliance-sensitive customers (e.g., SOC2, ISO).
• Prior work on large-scale data migrations or cutovers where customer data integrity, performance, and downtime risk had to be carefully balanced.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating database replication, backup/restore, and cutover workflows (for example, PostgreSQL or cloud-managed equivalents such as AWS RDS), including planning and executing low-risk migrations for large datasets.
• Experience with multi-tenant architectures, sharding, or routing strategies in high-traffic SaaS platforms.
• Familiarity with GitLab (self-managed or SaaS), and/or contributions to open source projects.

Benefits

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental leave
• Home office support