Senior Platform Engineer, GitLab Orbit

Details

GitLab Orbit is a high-impact knowledge graph data service supporting agents, analytics, and architecture-level features across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments. The Orbit team is a small, senior, Rust-first group within Data Engineering.

The role focuses on designing, building, and operating reliable, observable, secure, and scalable backend services in a distributed, cloud-native environment. Responsibilities include improving multi-tenant behavior, performance, resilience, operational readiness, deployment patterns, and cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate GitLab Orbit backend services, primarily in Rust.
• Improve deployment, monitoring, and operations across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments using Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and AWS and/or GCP services.
• Automate operational work related to deployments, upgrades, recovery, capacity management, and service maintenance.
• Strengthen observability across application, data, orchestration, and infrastructure layers through metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, and service-level indicators.
• Collaborate with site reliability engineering teams on incident response, on-call readiness, runbooks, and troubleshooting workflows.
• Investigate production issues and address underlying causes involving concurrency, partial failures, retries, consistency, idempotency, performance, and multi-tenant isolation.
• Build and improve the graph query engine, SDLC and code indexing pipelines, cloud storage integrations, APIs, and Model Context Protocol surfaces.
• Design reliable, scalable, and cost-aware data workflows using Amazon S3, ClickHouse, NATS, and Siphon.
• Own changes from technical design through rollout and iteration while documenting constraints and trade-offs.
• Collaborate asynchronously with product, data, infrastructure, security, delivery, artificial intelligence, and SRE teams.

Requirements

• Experience designing, building, and operating production backend services, with strong Rust skills or clear evidence of the ability to contribute to a Rust-first, performance-sensitive codebase.
• Experience with distributed-system design, including concurrency, failure handling, consistency, messaging, data partitioning, scalability, and multi-tenant isolation.
• Hands-on knowledge of AWS, GCP, or both, including cloud networking, identity and access management, compute, storage, and object storage such as Amazon S3.
• Experience deploying and troubleshooting applications on Kubernetes with Helm.
• Experience contributing to repeatable, reviewable infrastructure changes using Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Experience improving backend service reliability, observability, maintainability, and on-call readiness.
• Strong system design skills, including architectural decision-making, documenting constraints, and aligning trade-offs with product and platform needs.
• Ability to work autonomously in ambiguous environments, identify problems, drive solutions, and take ownership.
• Ability to learn and apply languages, tools, and frameworks such as Ruby, Go, TypeScript, and Vue.
• Excellent written communication and asynchronous collaboration skills, including thoughtful code review, mentoring, incident communication, and context sharing.

Benefits

• Benefits supporting health, finances, and well-being.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Team member resource groups.
• Equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan.
• Growth and development fund.
• Parental leave.

Compensation

The United States base salary range is $139,200–$235,200 USD. The range does not include bonuses, equity, or benefits. The stated salary range applies to United States residents; grade level and salary ranges are determined based on factors including education, experience, skills, abilities, equity, market data, and geographic location.

All GitLab roles are remote, subject to location-based eligibility requirements.