Opportunity at
GitLabSenior Platform Engineer, GitLab Orbit
GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, trusted by over fifty million registered users and more than fifty percent of the Fortune one hundred. The…
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About This Role
GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, trusted by over fifty million registered users and more than fifty percent of the Fortune one hundred. The company seeks a Senior Platform Engineer to join the Orbit team within the Data Engineering organization. In this role, you will help scale GitLab Orbit, a knowledge graph data service supporting agents, analytics, and architecture-level features across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments. You will…
Job Description
GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, trusted by over fifty million registered users and more than fifty percent of the Fortune one hundred. The company seeks a Senior Platform Engineer to join the Orbit team within the Data Engineering organization.
In this role, you will help scale GitLab Orbit, a knowledge graph data service supporting agents, analytics, and architecture-level features across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments. You will work within a small, senior, Rust-first team, focusing on how backend code runs inside a distributed, cloud-native architecture.
During your first year, you will own improvements to production operations, focusing on operational automation, observability, incident readiness, and reliability across distributed systems. Responsibilities include building backend services, enhancing multi-tenant behavior, designing graph query engines, and managing cloud storage integrations.
This position suits experienced engineers with strong backend capabilities who can design production systems, operate cloud infrastructure using tools like Kubernetes and Terraform, and collaborate asynchronously in a global, remote environment.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate backend services primarily in Rust within a distributed cloud-native environment.
- Improve deployment, monitoring, and operations across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed offerings using Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and cloud services from AWS or GCP.
- Automate routine operational workflows to make upgrades, recovery, capacity management, and service maintenance safer.
- Enhance observability across infrastructure, data, application, and orchestration layers by establishing metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerts.
- Collaborate with site reliability engineering teams to improve incident response readiness, troubleshooting workflows, and runbooks.
- Investigate production issues, resolve underlying root causes, and write resilient backend code handling concurrency and partial failures.
- Build and improve the graph query engine, SDLC code indexing pipelines, cloud storage integrations, and API and MCP surfaces.
- Manage technical changes end-to-end from technical design through rollout while documenting system constraints and trade-offs.
Requirements
- Experience designing, building, and operating production backend services with strong Rust skills or clear evidence of ability to contribute in a Rust-first codebase.
- Experience with distributed-system design concepts including concurrency, failure handling, consistency, messaging, data partitioning, scalability, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Hands-on knowledge of AWS or GCP, covering cloud networking, IAM, compute, and object storage like S3.
- Experience deploying and troubleshooting applications on Kubernetes with Helm and using Terraform for infrastructure as code.
- Demonstrated ability to improve reliability, observability, maintainability, and on-call readiness for backend services.
- Strong system design skills with the ability to articulate architectural decisions and align trade-offs with product requirements.
Qualifications
- Familiarity with adjacent parts of the stack such as Ruby, Go, TypeScript, and Vue.
- Demonstrated written communication and asynchronous collaboration skills through code reviews, mentoring, and context sharing.
Core Skills
Benefits
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
What is the employment type for this position?
The position is a full-time role.
Is the role remote?
All of GitLab's roles are remote, though hiring may involve specific location-based eligibility requirements that the talent acquisition team can clarify.
What is the salary range for this job?
The United States base salary range for the listed level is $139,200 to $235,200 USD, with exact figures determined by factors such as experience, skills, and geographic location.
What team does this role belong to?
This role sits on the Orbit team within GitLab's Data Engineering organization.
Sample Interview Questions
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