Senior Backend Engineer - Kubernetes & GitOps for GitLab

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer remote to join our innovative team at GitLab. As a key member of the Runway team, you will lead the design, evolution, and operation of our Kubernetes-based platform and developer tooling. This position offers the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and make a significant impact on our engineering organization.

What You'll Do

• Lead the operation and evolution of production-grade Kubernetes clusters across cloud environments, making architectural decisions on upgrades, scaling, disaster recovery, and reliability improvements that impact the entire organization.
• Define and drive GitOps strategy and standards across the organization, owning ArgoCD-based workflows by architecting Application Sets, sync policies, and deployment standards, and mentoring teams on GitOps best practices.
• Architect and establish Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code standards across teams, building reusable modules and practices that enable safe, scalable cloud infrastructure provisioning while establishing clear patterns for state management and drift detection.
• Lead platform observability strategy and incident response processes, set standards for monitoring and post-incident reviews, and drive organization-wide improvements to availability, performance, and resilience.
• Partner with and mentor application teams to onboard services onto the platform, establishing patterns for documentation, runbooks, and self-service tooling that scale across the organization and improve developer productivity.
• Design and establish security control standards such as role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, and secrets management that meet compliance requirements and scale across the organization.
• Drive integration of platform capabilities with continuous integration pipelines to establish end-to-end delivery workflows that set standards across the organization.

Requirements

• Experience operating and evolving production Kubernetes clusters across one or more cloud environments (e.g., Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Azure AKS).
• Experience designing and running GitOps-based continuous delivery workflows with ArgoCD, Flux, or similar tools.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent), including reusable modules, state management, and drift detection practices for safe infrastructure provisioning.
• Ability to write and maintain automation using a scripting language (e.g., Python, Bash, Go) and guide others on best practices.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including mentoring, writing clear system documentation, and establishing runbooks and best practices across teams.

Nice to Have

• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals (DNS, load balancing, ingress).
• Experience with service mesh technologies.
• Familiarity with security tools such as Vault or External Secrets Operator.

What We Offer

• Flexible Paid Time Off to support your work-life balance.
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Growth and Development Fund for your professional development.
• Parental leave for family support.
• Home office support to enhance your remote work experience.