Senior Site Reliability Engineer

An overview of this role

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are responsible for keeping all user-facing services and other GitLab production systems running smoothly. SREs are a blend of pragmatic operators and software craftspeople who apply sound engineering principles, operational discipline, and mature automation to our operating environments and the GitLab codebase.

In this role, you will join the Tenant Services, Geo team. Geo is a feature that replicates data from a GitLab instance to a warm-standby, and is used both for data migrations and disaster recovery. The Tenant Services, Geo team is responsible for supporting GitLab Dedicated customer migrations and Geo-related escalations across GitLab Dedicated (excluding FedRAMP environments).

We don’t expect you to have prior experience with Geo or Gitaly; familiarity with disaster recovery technologies or GitLab itself is sufficient, and we’ll support you in learning our specific stack.

The team’s mandate spans the full Geo operational surface, pre- and post-cutover data hygiene, migration execution, and non-migration Geo escalations, working closely with the core Geo team, Dedicated migrations, and Support. You will help evolve a reliable, low-risk cutover model for Dedicated migrations while improving tooling, automation, and observability so migrations become faster, safer, and more predictable over time.

What you’ll do

• 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.

What you’ll bring

• 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.

It’s a plus if you 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.