Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer, Database Operations

Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer, Database Operations

Join to apply for the Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer, Database Operations role at GitLab

GitLab is an open-core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI‑powered DevSecOps Platform used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co‑create the software that powers our world, accelerating human progress and redefining what’s possible in software development.

An overview of this role

You will join our Database Operations team as an Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer, keeping GitLab.com—one of the largest single‑tenancy open source SaaS platforms on the internet—running smoothly and reliably. In this role, you’ll take ownership of the PostgreSQL database infrastructure that powers millions of developers worldwide, automating operational tasks, improving system performance and reliability, and designing solutions that scale to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Your decisions directly impact the experience of our customers and inform product development across GitLab.

What you’ll do

• Automate operational tasks across all environments—package updates, configuration changes, and provisioning of user‑facing services—to make manual effort the exception.
• Design and maintain PostgreSQL database infrastructure components that allow GitLab.com to scale reliably while supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
• Respond to production incidents and platform emergencies, diagnosing and resolving database‑related issues quickly and thoroughly.
• Build observability systems that monitor database health, predict capacity needs, and alert on symptoms rather than outages.
• Develop and ship database performance solutions, including query optimization, migration reviews, and infrastructure recommendations.
• Create self‑service tools and automation—using Terraform, Ansible, Chef, and GitLab ChatOps—to empower engineering teams to manage database interactions safely.
• Document decisions, learnings, and operational procedures to build repeatable actions and future automation.
• Participate in regular on‑call rotations to keep GitLab.com operational during off‑hours and weekends.

What you’ll bring

• Hands‑on experience running PostgreSQL in high‑growth, large production environments, both self‑managed and database‑as‑a‑service.
• Expertise with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Chef, or Puppet.
• Solid understanding of SQL, PL/pgSQL, data modeling, and data structure design; ability to analyze PostgreSQL internals to troubleshoot and optimize systems.
• Experience managing reliability, performance, and scalability challenges at significant scale in distributed SaaS production environments.
• Strong written communication skills and a commitment to documentation, thriving in remote, asynchronous environments.
• A proactive, hands‑on approach to identifying issues, owning solutions, and contributing improvements to infrastructure and code.
• Capability to mentor junior team members and develop deep expertise in your domain areas.
• Back‑end engineering experience with languages such as Ruby or Go, and/or familiarity with OLAP databases like ClickHouse.

About The Team

We are responsible for building, running, and evolving the entire lifecycle of the PostgreSQL database engine that powers GitLab.com. You’ll be part of a fully distributed, asynchronous team that collaborates on database automation, infrastructure design, incident response, and capacity planning at a scale that impacts hundreds of thousands of concurrent users worldwide.

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

Seniority level

Associate

Employment type

Full‑time

Job function

Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

IT Services and IT Consulting, Software Development

Equal Opportunity

GitLab is proud to be an equal‑opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.