Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Environment Automation at GitLab

About GitLab

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to boost developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risks, and accelerate digital transformation. Trusted by over 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100, GitLab helps ship better, more secure software faster.

Our team embraces AI as a core productivity multiplier, expecting all team members to integrate AI into their daily workflows for efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab offers a high performance culture driven by strong values and continuous knowledge exchange, empowering team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems.

Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Environment Automation

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at GitLab, you will play a crucial role in maintaining the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of all user facing services and production systems. Our SREs combine a pragmatic operations mindset with strong software engineering practices to drive automation, reduce toil, and improve resilience across our platform.

In the Environment Automation specialization, your primary focus will be on operating and automating hundreds of GitLab environments, from initial provisioning to day to day maintenance. This role differentiates itself from other SRE positions by centering on automating the lifecycle of many tenant environments, ensuring they remain secure, consistent, and reliable at scale.

Example Projects You Could Work On:

• Designing infrastructure automation for provisioning and operating GitLab environments using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes.
• Creating and maintaining deployment packages for GitLab, such as Helm Charts and omnibus gitlab.
• Building and operating Dedicated GitLab instances integrated with cloud native services (e.g., GCP, AWS).
• Developing tools to orchestrate infrastructure as code workflows across multiple tenants.
• Deploying and managing microservices on Kubernetes clusters at scale.
• Enhancing GitLab’s observability stack (e.g., Prometheus, ELK) to support proactive monitoring and incident response.
• Integrating with and operating infrastructure in cloud provider ecosystems (e.g., IAM, networking, storage).
• Championing and implementing cloud security best practices across automated infrastructure.

What You’ll Do

• Build & Scale Multi Tenant Infrastructure: Design and implement automation for provisioning and managing hundreds of isolated GitLab environments using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes. Manage complex state strategies and workspace configurations to support scalability and maintainability.
• Debug & Resolve Production Issues: Troubleshoot issues across Kubernetes clusters, cloud services, and GitLab applications. Identify root causes of failed deployments, crash loops, and scheduling conflicts to ensure service continuity.
• Automate Operations at Scale: Replace manual workflows with infrastructure as code solutions, including automated version upgrades, configuration rollouts, and provisioning pipelines that operate reliably across all tenants.
• Monitor & Predict Capacity: Build observability systems to detect bottlenecks, predict usage trends, and optimize resource consumption using tools like Prometheus, ELK, and Grafana.
• Respond & Lead During Incidents: Lead incident response and postmortem efforts, applying technical depth to resolve issues and establish operational standards that reduce future risk.
• Architect & Collaborate: Influence architectural decisions around automation, scalability, and operational excellence. Partner with engineering teams to improve automation, platform resilience, and production readiness.

What You’ll Bring

• Production Scale Experience: Proven ability to operate and troubleshoot production workloads across multiple tenants or environments. Deep understanding of how distributed systems fail at scale and how to build in resilience.
• Terraform & IaC Mastery: Strong hands on experience with Terraform, including workspace strategies, state management, and automation patterns that scale. Comfortable solving state isolation issues and building reliable, reusable infrastructure code. Experience with Ansible and templating tools like Jsonnet is a plus.
• Kubernetes in Production: Skilled at diagnosing deployment failures, interpreting pod logs, and debugging scheduling issues and rollback scenarios in live environments. Understands how pods, ReplicaSets, and controllers interact in production.
• Programming & Code Analysis: Ability to read and debug code in Go and/or Ruby. Familiar with identifying performance issues, scalability concerns, and contributing to infrastructure tooling through thoughtful code analysis.
• Large Scale Operations Background: Experience supporting infrastructure for many customers or environments simultaneously. Comfortable managing isolation, scaling, monitoring, and incident response across diverse workloads.
• Architecture & Incident Response: Able to reason through complex systems and operational challenges. Brings on call experience and can lead technical discussions and incident resolution efforts under pressure.
• Customer Focused Collaboration: Proven ability to work across teams and with internal or external customers to solve technical problems while maintaining service commitments and clear communication.
• GitLab Platform Proficiency: Comfortable using GitLab as a daily tool for infrastructure automation, collaboration, and operational workflows.

About the Team

GitLab’s Dedicated team, where the SRE Environment Automation role sits, is focused on delivering a fully managed, single tenant GitLab experience through the GitLab Dedicated platform. Our goal is to eliminate manual operations across the entire lifecycle of customer environments, including provisioning, upgrades, security, and monitoring, so customers can focus on unlocking the full potential of The One DevOps Platform without managing the underlying infrastructure. We build scalable, automated systems that ensure each GitLab Dedicated instance is secure, consistent, and production ready - whether we're managing 10 environments or hundreds.

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 & Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Growth and Development Fund.
• Parental Leave.

We welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience, and many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Studies show that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every 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.