Principal Engineer, Infrastructure Platforms

An overview of this role

We’re looking for a Principal Engineer with deep expertise in Site Reliability, Backend, or Platform Engineering to lead high-impact platform initiatives for our multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure. This role blends technical vision, architectural leadership, and organizational influence—shaping how GitLab’s infrastructure scales to meet both business demands and customer expectations.

You’ll own the technical roadmap across key areas of Production Engineering—spanning Observability, Network Edge, Disaster Recovery, and Runway—while partnering closely with our Database Operations and Cells teams.

You’ll also play a key role in mentoring senior engineers, helping to elevate technical excellence and maturity across the organization.

What you’ll do

• Drive platform modernization by assessing current systems and leading strategic improvements to support future scale.
• Partner closely with platform and infrastructure teams to ensure architectural decisions align with long-term business objectives.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership, Engineering Managers, and product teams to align production engineering efforts with overall platform strategy.
• Work cross-functionally to anticipate and address evolving infrastructure needs, with particular focus on initiatives like Cells.
• Shape how GitLab meets the infrastructure needs of other teams by uncovering patterns, addressing gaps, and identifying opportunities to enhance support.
• Drive and shape roadmap discussions across SRE, observability, operations, and capacity planning to align technical direction with business priorities.
• Lead architectural strategy to elevate resiliency, scalability, and performance across GitLab’s multi-tenant SaaS platform.
• Look for opportunities to align technical solutions with our counterparts on Dedicated (the single-tenant SaaS platform)
• Mentor senior engineers and work with EMs to ensure platform teams are equipped and aligned to support high-priority initiatives.

What you’ll bring

• Strong background in backend, site reliability or platform engineering.
• Proven experience designing, building, and scaling production infrastructure and platform services.
• Strategic mindset with a strong ability to connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-functional initiatives that enhanced system-level performance and reliability.
• Skilled at driving alignment across engineering roadmaps involving multiple infrastructure teams.
• Proficient in modern programming languages such as Go or Ruby.
• Strong foundation in observability, infrastructure operations, and ensuring production readiness
• Collaborative spirit and proven ability to mentor and influence engineers and leaders alike.