Senior Platform Engineer, GitLab Orbit

About the Company

Responsibilities

• ● Design, build, and operate GitLab Orbit backend services, primarily in Rust, within a distributed, cloud-native environment.
• ● Improve the deployment, monitoring, and operations of GitLab Orbit across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments using Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and cloud services from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or both.
• ● Automate recurring operational work and build tools that make deployments, upgrades, recovery, capacity management, and service maintenance safer and more efficient.
• ● Strengthen observability across application, data, orchestration, and infrastructure layers by improving metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, and service-level indicators to track availability, error rates, and incident response time while collaborating with site reliability engineering teams to improve incident response, on-call readiness, runbooks, and troubleshooting workflows.
• ● Investigate production issues, address underlying causes, and write backend code that handles concurrency, partial failures, retries, consistency, idempotency, performance, and multi-tenant isolation.
• ● Build and improve the graph query engine, software development lifecycle (SDLC) and code indexing pipelines, cloud storage integrations, and application programming interface (API) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) surfaces.
• ● Design reliable, scalable, and cost-aware data workflows using systems such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), ClickHouse, NATS, and Siphon.
• ● Own changes from technical design through rollout and iteration, documenting constraints and trade-offs while collaborating asynchronously with product, data, infrastructure, security, delivery, artificial intelligence, and SRE teams.

Requirements

• ● Hands-on knowledge of AWS, GCP, or both, including cloud networking, identity and access management, compute, storage, and object storage such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
• ● Strong system design skills, including making and explaining architectural decisions, documenting constraints, and aligning trade-offs with product and platform needs; ability to work autonomously in ambiguous environments by identifying problems, driving solutions, and taking ownership.
• ● Ability to learn and apply new languages, tools, and frameworks as the problem requires, such as Ruby, Go, or TypeScript and Vue in adjacent parts of the stack, along with excellent written communication and asynchronous collaboration skills demonstrated through thoughtful code review, mentoring, incident communication, and context sharing.
• ● About the team
• ● The Orbit team sits within the Data Engineering organization and builds GitLab Orbit, the service that turns GitLab's SDLC and code data into a unified property graph. We expose it through a high-performance, ClickHouse-backed query engine and MCP tools. We're a small group of senior engineers, working closely with partners across AI, including GitLab Duo Agent Platform, analytics, infrastructure, delivery, and security because our work touches many layers of the platform.
• ● We work asynchronously and value strong ownership. We expect each engineer to build a deep understanding of the system and help evolve it over time. As adoption grows, we're focused on scaling the service sustainably and making it reliable and easy to deploy and operate for GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed customers. The base salary range for this role's listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity . Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary. United States Salary Range 139,200 - 235,200 USD How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees
• ● 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.
• ● Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.
• ● 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 .