GitLab.com is currently a single massive multi-tenant instance. The Group Tenant Scale (GTS) team is re-architecting GitLab.com into a modern, distributed SaaS platform composed of Cells and Organizations, supported by OrgMover. This transformation aims to make GitLab.com horizontally scalable, resilient, and flexible, ensuring high reliability, global reach, and freedom to grow for customers of all sizes.
Requirements
- Extensive experience designing, developing, migrating, scaling, and operating large distributed systems in a SaaS context.
- Hands-on programming experience in Ruby and/or Go, with the ability to dive into code, review implementations, and guide technical design.
- Proven track record leading transformations from monolithic to distributed architectures, ideally including Postgres sharding or other database partitioning strategies.
- Hands-on expertise with service communication and observability at scale (e.g. service mesh/Istio, Kafka, tracing/metrics).
- Principal-level technical leadership: ability to set strategy, influence across organizations, and mentor principal and senior engineers.
- Balance of infrastructure depth and application architecture awareness; skilled at making system-level tradeoffs that prioritize reliability and customer experience.
- Experience in regulated or high-reliability domains (finance, healthcare, government, telecom).
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture and design for Cells, Organizations and OrgMover, enabling Postgres sharding, zero-downtime migrations, and global SaaS scalability and regionality.
- Solve complex distributed systems challenges: tenant isolation, regional distribution, multi-region replication, observability, fault tolerance, and migrations.
- Partner across infrastructure, product, and executive teams to ensure our SaaS evolution aligns with both technical excellence and business needs.
- Translate architectural tradeoffs into clear direction for engineering managers, senior engineers, and executives.
- Mentor and elevate engineers across teams, raising the bar for technical leadership and inclusive collaboration.
- Provide thought leadership inside and outside GitLab on SaaS scaling, distributed systems, and platform reliability.
- Drive the design of distributed systems at scale, influence architectural strategy across engineering, and partner with leaders to align infrastructure with business outcomes.
Other
- Excellent communication skills; able to make complex systems understandable to technical and non-technical audiences.
- All remote, asynchronous work environment
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Growth and development budget
- GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer.
