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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

GitLab is seeking a Principal Engineer to set technical direction for our most critical infrastructure platforms. This role operates at organizational scale, owning architecture, solving complex systems problems, and driving initiatives that shape how GitLab grows, performs, and remains reliable.

As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a technical authority and force multiplier, leading architectural decisions across distributed and cloud-native systems to translate business strategy into durable technical direction. Spanning multiple teams and domains, you will bring clarity to ambiguity, raise engineering standards, and mentor senior talent while remaining accountable for real production outcomes. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for leaders who drive success through influence and shape the foundational platforms that the entire organization depends on.

Organizational Focus Areas

Principal Engineers at GitLab drive strategy across our most critical infrastructure and delivery groups. Role placement across the following tracks is determined by business need and organizational priority.

Production Engineering (Infrastructure Platforms)

This track leads high-impact platform initiatives for our multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure. You will lead the technical roadmap across key areas of Production Engineering to ensure our global operations remain resilient and modern.

• Core Focus: Lead strategy for Observability, Network Edge, Disaster Recovery, and Runway.
• Modernization: Drive platform modernization by assessing current systems and leading strategic improvements to support future scale.
• Collaboration: Partner with Database Operations and Cells teams to align production engineering efforts with the overall platform strategy.

Group Tenant Scale (GTS)

This track builds GitLab’s next generation, multi-tenant, horizontally scalable, and resilient SaaS platform. You will architect the foundations that enable all other engineering teams to deliver features.

• Core Focus: Lead the design and evolution of core multi-tenancy projects, including Cells, Organizations, and OrgMover.
• Distributed Architecture: Architect for zero downtime, transparent relocation, and application hardening in a massive distributed environment.
• Strategic Decisions: Guide architecture decisions with availability, reliability, resiliency, performance, and cost in mind.

GitLab Delivery

The GitLab Delivery track focuses on enhancing the reliability, efficiency, and speed of GitLab’s end-to-end software delivery across all platforms and offerings.

• Core Focus: Lead the platform strategy spanning Developer Experience, CI infrastructure, packaging, and release delivery across SaaS, Self-Managed, and Dedicated.
• Developer Experience: Treat GitLab engineers as customers, building self-service tooling, testing infrastructure, and paved paths that increase velocity while maintaining quality.
• Delivery at Scale: Architect reliable, automated pipelines that streamline how GitLab is packaged, released, and deployed across all platforms and offerings.

What You'll Do

• Own and drive the architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms that support GitLab at global scale.
• Lead the design and evolution of large platforms and distributed systems that are scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-efficient.
• Serve as the technical authority on complex initiatives, guiding decisions that impact multiple teams and product areas.
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans.
• Drive alignment across engineering, product, and leadership by clearly communicating tradeoffs and recommendations.
• Establish technical standards and architectural patterns that raise quality and consistency across the organization.
• Be accountable for production outcomes, including reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a force multiplier through influence rather than direct authority.
• Operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces where both the problem and the solution need to be defined.

What You'll Bring

• Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale platforms or distributed systems in cloud-native environments.
• Strong proficiency in Golang and/or Ruby, with the ability to contribute to, review, and guide core architectural changes in production codebases.
• Strong architectural judgment, including the ability to balance scalability, reliability, performance, security, and cost.
• Experience owning platform-level technical decisions that impacted multiple teams or an entire engineering domain.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes-based environments as a production platform, including how they influence system design, deployment models, reliability, and operational complexity.
• Experience being accountable for production systems, not just design recommendations.
• Ability to author and drive long-term technical strategy and multi-month roadmaps.
• Track record of leading through influence and shaping technical direction without direct authority.
• Comfort making high-impact technical decisions, including build vs buy vs partner tradeoffs.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.

About the team

The Principal Engineer role sits within GitLab’s Infrastructure Platforms organization, working across multiple teams to shape how our platform scales and operates. This group is responsible for some of GitLab’s most critical systems, including the multi-tenant SaaS platform, core delivery pipelines, and the underlying infrastructure that powers millions of users. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll define technical direction, guide architectural decisions, and ensure our platforms remain resilient, performant, and modern. The team operates fully remotely and collaborates asynchronously across time zones, grounded in GitLab’s values of transparency, autonomy, and open communication. You’ll help the organization tackle complex distributed systems challenges at scale while mentoring other engineers and building a culture focused on reliability, efficiency, and continuous improvement.

How GitLab will support you

• 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
• Home office support

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.

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