Senior Platform Engineer, GitLab Orbit at GitLab

Role overview

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 Senior Platform Engineer on the Orbit team, you'll help build and scale GitLab Orbit, a high-impact knowledge graph data service that supports agents, analytics, and architecture-level features across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments. You'll join a small, senior, Rust-first team and focus on how backend code behaves within a distributed, cloud-native system, making graph capabilities reliable, observable, secure, and easy for other teams and agents to use.

In this role, you'll own meaningful parts of the service end to end. You'll design and implement backend services, data workflows, and interfaces while improving multi-tenant behavior, performance, resilience, and operational readiness. You'll also contribute to the cloud infrastructure and deployment patterns needed to run the service effectively.

In your first year, you'll take ownership of improving how GitLab Orbit runs in production, with a focus on operational automation, observability, incident readiness, and distributed-system reliability. You'll also contribute to key areas such as the graph query engine, indexing pipelines, cloud storage integrations, and multi-tenant behavior. Through thoughtful system design, better tooling, clear runbooks, and shared context, you'll help reduce single points of failure and improve how we build, deploy, and operate the service.

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 .

Responsibilities

• Lead or deliver technical work for GitLab Orbit platform engineering.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, services and customer teams.
• Improve reliability, performance, testing, automation and documentation.
• Translate requirements into maintainable software and service outcomes.

Qualifications

• 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.
• 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.

Technology in this role

• TypeScript: TypeScript AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• AWS: TypeScript AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• GCP: TypeScript AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• Kubernetes: TypeScript AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• Go: TypeScript AWS GCP Kubernetes .
• Rust: You'll join a small, senior, Rust-first team and focus on how backend code behaves within a distributed, cloud-native system, making graph capabilities reliable, observable, secure, and easy for other teams and agents to .
• Ruby: 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 .
• Amazon Web Services: • 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 .
• Google Cloud: • 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 .
• Terraform: • 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 .
• CAN: Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting .

Benefits

• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan

About GitLab

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.

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