Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Environment Automation

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

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.

*Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at GitLab, you’ll help keep all user-facing services and production systems reliable, scalable, and efficient. Our SREs combine a pragmatic operations mindset with strong software engineering practices to drive automation, reduce toil, and improve resilience across our platform.

In the Environment Automation specialization, your focus is on operating and automating hundreds of GitLab environments—from initial provisioning to day-to-day maintenance tasks. 

Unlike other SRE roles, this position centers on automating the lifecycle of many tenant environments, ensuring they remain secure, consistent, and reliable at scale.

Some examples of the projects you could work on:

• Designing infrastructure automation that provisions and operates GitLab environments using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes
• Creating and maintaining deployment packages for GitLab, such as Helm Charts and omnibus-gitlab
• Building and operating Dedicated GitLab instances integrated with cloud-native services (e.g., GCP, AWS)
• Developing tools to orchestrate infrastructure-as-code workflows across multiple tenants
• Deploying and managing microservices on Kubernetes clusters at scale
• Enhancing GitLab’s observability stack (e.g., Prometheus, ELK) to support proactive monitoring and incident response
• Integrating with and operating infrastructure in cloud provider ecosystems (e.g., IAM, networking, storage)
• Championing and implementing cloud security best practices across automated infrastructure

What You’ll Do

• Build & Scale Multi-Tenant Infrastructure: Design and implement automation that provisions and manages hundreds of isolated GitLab environments using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes. Manage complex state strategies and workspace configurations to support scale and maintainability.
• Debug & Resolve Production Issues: Troubleshoot issues across Kubernetes clusters, cloud services, and GitLab apps—identifying root causes of failed deployments, crash loops, and scheduling conflicts to ensure service continuity.
• Automate Operations at Scale: Replace manual workflows with infrastructure-as-code solutions, including automated version upgrades, configuration rollouts, and provisioning pipelines that operate reliably across all tenants.
• Monitor & Predict Capacity: Build observability systems that detect bottlenecks, predict usage trends, and optimize resource consumption using tools like Prometheus, ELK, and Grafana.
• Respond & Lead During Incidents: Lead incident response and postmortem efforts, applying technical depth to resolve issues and establish operational standards that reduce future risk.
• Architect & Collaborate: Influence architectural decisions around automation, scalability, and operational excellence. Partner with engineering teams to improve automation, platform resilience, and production-readiness.

What You’ll Bring

• Production-Scale Experience: Proven ability to operate and troubleshoot production workloads across multiple tenants or environments. Deep understanding of how distributed systems fail at scale and how to build in resilience.
  Terraform & IaC Mastery: Strong hands-on experience with Terraform, including workspace strategies, state management, and automation patterns that scale. Comfortable solving state isolation issues and building reliable, reusable infrastructure code. Experience with Ansible and templating tools like Jsonnet is a plus.
  Kubernetes in Production: Skilled at diagnosing deployment failures, interpreting pod logs, and debugging scheduling issues and rollback scenarios in live environments. Understands how pods, ReplicaSets, and controllers interact in production.
  Programming & Code Analysis: Ability to read and debug code in Go and/or Ruby. Familiar with identifying performance issues, scalability concerns, and contributing to infrastructure tooling through thoughtful code analysis.
  Large Scale Operations Background: Experience supporting infrastructure for many customers or environments simultaneously. Comfortable managing isolation, scaling, monitoring, and incident response across diverse workloads.
  Architecture & Incident Response: Able to reason through complex systems and operational challenges. Brings on-call experience and can lead technical discussions and incident resolution efforts under pressure.
  Customer-Focused Collaboration: Proven ability to work across teams and with internal or external customers to solve technical problems while maintaining service commitments and clear communication.
  GitLab Platform Proficiency: Comfortable using GitLab as a daily tool for infrastructure automation, collaboration, and operational workflows.

About the team
GitLab’s Dedicated team, where the SRE Environment Automation role sits, is on a mission to deliver a fully managed, single-tenant GitLab experience through the GitLab Dedicated platform. Our goal is to eliminate manual operations across the entire lifecycle of customer environments, including provisioning, upgrades, security, and monitoring, so customers can focus on unlocking the full potential of The One DevOps Platform without managing the underlying infrastructure. We build scalable, automated systems that ensure each GitLab Dedicated instance is secure, consistent, and production-ready—whether we're managing 10 environments or hundreds.

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

• 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 

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.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.  

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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 (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.