Staff Engineer, Delivery - Operate

An overview of this role

As a Staff Engineer within the Git Lab Operate team, you will lead the technical direction for Git Lab's self-managed deployment strategy, with a particular focus on solving zero-downtime upgrades and operational excellence s is a high-impact technical leadership role where you'll architect and implement the systems that enable thousands of organizations to deploy, upgrade, and operate Git Lab reliably in their own infrastructure.

You'll be the technical anchor for our newly formed Operate team, driving the evolution of Git Lab's deployment tooling from traditional packaging approaches toward cloud-native, operator-driven automation. Your work will directly impact Git Lab's ability to deliver new features to self-managed customers faster while dramatically reducing operational complexity and upgrading friction.

The Git Lab Operate team serves as a critical bridge between Git Lab engineering and our self-managed customers, ensuring our products are easily deployable, secure, and scalable across a range of environments—from single-node VM deployments to large-scale Kubernetes clusters supporting tens of thousands of users.

• Define the technical vision for Git Lab's cloud-native deployment and upgrades future, balancing operational simplicity, customer needs, and engineering constraints
• Lead the design and implementation of the new tooling, including Operator(s), enabling automated lifecycle management and zero-downtime upgrades
• Architect upgrade orchestration systems that safely coordinate complex multi-component upgrades across databases, application services, and auxiliary components
• Establish operational maturity standards and guidance for new services being integrated into Git Lab's deployment tooling and empowering development teams for the end-to-end of their components
• Drive technical decisions around service integration patterns, deployment models, and operational interfaces

Lead complex initiatives overarching multiple groups and be the technical leadership voice that set the direction and drives technical decisions

• Design production-grade Kubernetes Operators that aims to reliable reconciliation logic for complex stateful applications
• Design and implement upgrade orchestration that handles database migrations, rolling deployments, compatibility checks, and rollback capabilities
• Develop tooling and automation to reduce the operational complexity of running Git Lab at scale
• Create integration frameworks that enable development teams to ship new services with standardized deployment patterns
• Maintain and evolve Git Lab Helm Charts to support both simple and complex deployment topologies

• Contribute to safe database migration strategies for zero-downtime upgrades across Postgre
  
  SQL and other stateful components
• Implement compatibility layers that enable incremental upgrades without requiring simultaneous updates across all components
• Design and contribute to build validation and pre-flight check systems that detect potential upgrade issues before they impact production

• Partner with development teams to define integration requirements for new services and features
• Collaborate with Git Lab Dedicated and  SRE teams to align deployment patterns and operational practices
• Work with Product Management to translate customer needs into technical requirements
• Mentor and guide other engineers on the team, establishing technical standards and best practices
• Create technical documentation and runbooks that enable customer success and support teams

• Define and implement observability standards for self-managed deployments, including metrics, logging, and alerting
• Build automated testing frameworks that validate deployment and upgrade scenarios across reference architectures
• Establish performance benchmarks and capacity planning guidance for different deployment scales
• Design resilience patterns for handling failures during upgrades and operations
• Contribute to incident response and post-mortems for…