Principal Engineer, Production Engineering

Remote

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.

An overview of this role

As a Principal Engineer on the Production Engineering team, you'll shape how GitLab.com scales for reliability, performance, and global reach. You'll guide the technical strategy for GitLab’s multi-tenant SaaS platform, solving challenges that few companies face at this scale and ensuring that millions of users experience a fast, resilient, and secure product every day. You’ll influence infrastructure decisions across observability, disaster recovery, fleet management, and service delivery, creating patterns that make our platform more reliable, efficient, and cost effective as usage grows.

You’ll architect and lead complex distributed systems initiatives, from sharding and multi-tenant isolation to failure recovery and end-to-end observability. You’ll build and evolve production readiness and reliability frameworks that move the organization from reactive firefighting to proactive prevention, and you’ll champion practices that improve how quickly and safely we can ship changes to customers. Working hands-on in the codebase and partnering closely with product, infrastructure, and executive leadership, you’ll turn long-term platform strategy into incremental, customer-visible improvements and help define the next generation of GitLab.com’s production architecture.

What you'll do

  • Own the long-term technical roadmap for Production Engineering, driving modernization and scale initiatives that directly improve GitLab.com reliability, performance, and global availability.
  • Lead design and decision-making for complex distributed systems challenges such as multi-tenant isolation, sharding, observability, disaster recovery, and resilient service delivery.
  • Define and champion production readiness standards, building patterns and guardrails that help product teams ship features quickly while maintaining reliability and performance at scale.
  • Build and evolve observability, alerting, and incident response practices so Production Engineering can detect issues early, respond effectively, and turn learnings into automated, repeatable workflows.
  • Partner with engineering, product, and infrastructure leaders to align platform investments with business priorities, translating long-term strategy into incremental, customer-visible improvements.
  • Identify and deliver opportunities to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness across the platform, including capacity planning, fleet management, and infrastructure optimization.
  • Mentor and coach senior and staff engineers, providing technical leadership, feedback, and guidance that raises the bar for design quality, operational excellence, and long-term thinking.
  • Contribute directly to critical code paths and architecture documents, staying hands-on with the stack so you can deep-dive into complex production issues and prototype solutions when needed.

What you'll bring

  • Proven expertise designing, operating, and scaling distributed systems in large, multi-tenant SaaS or cloud environments with strong reliability and disaster recovery requirements.
  • Deep understanding of production infrastructure concepts such as observability, capacity planning, incident response, failure domains, and high availability across regions.
  • Background leading architecture for complex platforms, including areas like sharding, multi-tenant isolation, network and traffic routing, and resilient service-to-service communication.
  • Hands-on coding skills and comfort working across the stack, from infrastructure and platform services to backend application code, using languages such as Go, Ruby, or similar.
  • Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, GitOps practices, security hardening, and site reliability engineering principles applied to large-scale production systems.
  • Ability to debug complex, cross-system issues, translate findings into durable technical improvements, and turn incident learnings into repeatable automation and patterns.
  • Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams, providing practical guidance on reliability, performance, and production readiness for new and existing services.
  • Openness to collaborating with people from diverse technical backgrounds, with a focus on clear communication, shared ownership, and mentoring senior and staff engineers.

About the team

Production Engineering is a function within the Engineering organization with a mission to ensure GitLab.com is reliable, performant, and scalable for millions of users around the world. We focus on the production infrastructure, tooling, and practices that power GitLab’s multi-tenant SaaS platform, partnering closely with product and infrastructure teams across regions in an all-remote, asynchronous way. As part of this group, you'll help shape how we evolve our architecture for global scale, reliability, and efficiency, creating patterns and platforms that other engineering teams can adopt with confidence. For more on how we work, see the Team Handbook Page.

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.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range

$171,400 - $367,200 USD

How GitLab will support you

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.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.  

Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.

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. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.

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