Senior Backend Engineer, GitLab Delivery: Zero Downtime Upgrades

GitLab is an all remote company and its DevSecOps platform is used by more than 50 million registered users. This role sits on the Upgrades team, which exists so customers running GitLab on their own infrastructure can install and upgrade it without breaking things. The surface is the delivery tooling rather than the product UI: the Omnibus GitLab package, the GitLab Helm Charts, the GitLab Environment Toolkit and the GitLab Operator, all aimed at making self managed GitLab easier to deploy, secure by default and scalable across major clouds. Concretely you would improve upgrade success rates, build automation and observability into deployment tooling, work with Security on secure defaults, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that validate all four components. The language is Go with Ruby useful alongside it. GitLab publishes no years figure on this posting, so we have marked it not stated rather than guessing.

What the posting asks for. Note that GitLab does not publish a years of experience figure for this role, so judge yourself against the skills rather than a number:
- Experience operating backend services in production, including deployment, monitoring and maintenance in Kubernetes and Helm based environments.
- Proficiency in Go for building observable and resilient services, with working knowledge of Ruby as a useful addition.
- Hands on practice with infrastructure as code, including Terraform, and managing infrastructure across cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS or Microsoft Azure.
- Knowledge of database design, operations and troubleshooting, especially PostgreSQL in secure and scalable setups.
- Knowledge of secure, scalable and reliable deployment practices, including service scaling and rollout strategies.
- Familiarity with observability tools and patterns such as Prometheus and Grafana.

What the work actually looks like:
- Maintain and evolve the Omnibus GitLab package for reliable, production ready self managed deployments, improving deployment stability and upgrade success rates and reducing escalations.
- Develop and improve GitLab Helm Charts so core components integrate cleanly and scale across supported environments.
- Enhance the GitLab Environment Toolkit, validated reference architectures and the GitLab Operator for secure, Kubernetes native lifecycle management.
- Improve installation, upgrade and operational workflows so self managed customers get a consistent experience.
- Partner with Security to address vulnerabilities and deliver secure defaults in the deployment stack.
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that validate and test Omnibus, Charts, GET and the Operator.
- Work with Distribution Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Release Managers and development teams.
- Guide architectural direction, mentor backend engineers and contribute to the roadmap for self managed delivery.

How the team works: the posting describes a globally distributed, all remote group working asynchronously with SRE, Release, Security and Development teams across regions.

Location and working pattern: GitLab states that all of its roles are remote, and that some roles carry specific location based eligibility requirements which its talent acquisition team can clarify. This listing is open to India. That combination, remote backend work open to India, is the single most requested thing by readers of this list.

One more thing worth knowing: GitLab states that it treats AI as a core productivity multiplier and expects all team members to incorporate AI into their daily workflows.

Honest fit guidance: with no years figure published, the deciding factor is whether you have run backend services in Kubernetes and written Go. Deployment tooling is a specialism, so if you have packaged and shipped software that other people install and operate, that experience counts here more than a year count would.