Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer, Database Operations

An overview of this role

You will join our Database Operations team as an Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer, keeping GitLab.com—one of the largest single-tenancy open source SaaS platforms on the internet—running smoothly and reliably. In this role, you'll take ownership of the PostgreSQL database infrastructure that powers millions of developers worldwide, automating operational tasks, improving system performance and reliability, and designing solutions that scale to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. You'll work at a unique scale where your decisions directly impact the experience of our customers and the feedback you generate informs product development across GitLab. Over your first year, you'll establish expertise in a core area of database operations, mentor junior team members, and drive projects that deliver measurable improvements to system efficiency and reliability.

You bring both pragmatic operational discipline and software craftsmanship to this role. You're not just responding to incidents—you're designing systems and building automation that prevent them. You'll partner with engineering teams across GitLab to review database changes, optimize performance, and help others succeed through self-service tooling and knowledge sharing. This is hands-on infrastructure work at scale, where your contributions directly shape how reliably and securely GitLab serves the entire platform.

Some examples of projects you could work on:

• Design and implement mature automation for database provisioning, replication, and backup testing using tools like Terraform and Ansible.
• Develop self-service tools and dashboards that empower other teams to manage their own database resources.
• Lead capacity planning and scalability initiatives to ensure GitLab.com continues growing reliably.
• Participate in production incident response and help implement systemic improvements to prevent recurrence.

What you’ll do

• Automate operational tasks across all environments—from package updates and configuration changes to provisioning of user-facing services—so manual effort becomes the exception, not the rule.
• Design and maintain PostgreSQL database infrastructure components that allow GitLab.com to scale reliably while supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
• Respond to production incidents and platform emergencies, working with peer SREs to diagnose and resolve database-related issues quickly and thoroughly.
• Build observability systems that monitor database health, predict capacity needs based on usage patterns, and alert on symptoms rather than outages.
• Develop and ship database performance solutions in collaboration with product and engineering teams, including query optimization, migration reviews, and infrastructure recommendations.
• Create self-service tools and automation—using Terraform, Ansible, Chef, and GitLab ChatOps—that empower engineering teams to manage their own database interactions safely.
• Document decisions, learnings, and operational procedures so that knowledge becomes repeatable actions and eventually becomes automation.
• Participate in regularly scheduled on-call rotations to ensure GitLab.com remains operational during off-hours and weekends when necessary.

What you’ll bring

• Hands-on experience running PostgreSQL in high-growth, large production environments, including both self-managed infrastructure and database-as-a-service platforms.
• Expertise with infrastructure automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Chef, or Puppet to automate operational tasks and drive system reliability.
• Solid understanding of SQL, PL/pgSQL, data modeling, and data structure design; ability to analyze PostgreSQL internals to troubleshoot and optimize systems.
• Experience working in large-scale, distributed SaaS production environments where you've managed reliability, performance, and scalability challenges at significant scale.
• Strong written communication skills and commitment to documentation; you thrive in remote, asynchronous environments and share knowledge effectively across your team.
• Proactive, hands-on approach where you identify issues, take ownership of solutions, and contribute improvements to infrastructure and code.
• Capability to mentor junior team members and develop deep expertise in your domain areas, then share that knowledge to help others grow.
• Backend engineering experience with languages such as Ruby or Go, and/or familiarity with OLAP databases like Clickhouse.

About the team

We are responsible for building, running, and evolving the entire lifecycle of the PostgreSQL database engine that powers GitLab.com. You’ll be part of our team focused on owning the reliability, scalability, performance, and security of our database infrastructure and supporting services. GitLab.com is one of the largest single-tenancy open source SaaS sites on the internet, which means your work directly impacts hundreds of thousands of concurrent users worldwide. We operate in a fully distributed, asynchronous environment across multiple regions, collaborating on everything from database automation and infrastructure design to incident response and capacity planning. You’ll be solving novel challenges at scale—from implementing observability stacks that predict capacity needs to designing the infrastructure components that allow GitLab to scale reliably. We continuously seek to reduce complexity and improve efficiency by leveraging cloud vendor managed products and services where appropriate, ensuring GitLab.com remains a best-in-class production environment. For more on how we operate, see Database Operations Team Handbook Page.