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Salary: USD 139,200 - 235,200 / annual
GitLab is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to join the Orbit team, which builds GitLab Orbit—a high-impact knowledge graph data service that powers agents, analytics, and architecture-level features across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments. You will join a small, senior, Rust-first team focused on making backend systems reliable, observable, secure, and easy for other teams and agents to use within a distributed, cloud-native environment.
In this role, you will own meaningful parts of the service end-to-end, designing and implementing backend services, data workflows, and interfaces while improving multi-tenant behavior, performance, resilience, and operational readiness. You will also contribute to cloud infrastructure and deployment patterns needed to run the service effectively.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design, build, and operate GitLab Orbit backend services primarily in Rust within a distributed, cloud-native environment
- Improve deployment, monitoring, and operations across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments using Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and AWS/GCP
- Automate recurring operational work and build tools for safer, more efficient deployments, upgrades, recovery, and capacity management
- Strengthen observability across application, data, orchestration, and infrastructure layers by improving metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, and service-level indicators
- Investigate production issues, address root causes, and write backend code handling concurrency, partial failures, retries, consistency, idempotency, performance, and multi-tenant isolation
- Build and improve the graph query engine, SDLC and code indexing pipelines, cloud storage integrations, and API/MCP surfaces
- Design reliable, scalable, cost-aware data workflows using S3, ClickHouse, NATS, and Siphon
- Own changes from technical design through rollout and iteration, collaborating asynchronously with product, data, infrastructure, security, delivery, AI, and SRE teams
In your first year, you will focus on improving how GitLab Orbit runs in production, with emphasis on operational automation, observability, incident readiness, and distributed-system reliability. The Orbit team sits within the Data Engineering organization and works asynchronously, valuing strong ownership and deep system understanding.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Experience designing, building, and operating production backend services with strong Rust skills or clear evidence of ability to ramp up and contribute in a Rust-first, performance-sensitive codebase
- Experience with distributed-system design, including concurrency, failure handling, consistency, messaging, data partitioning, scalability, and multi-tenant isolation
- Hands-on knowledge of AWS, GCP, or both, including cloud networking, identity and access management, compute, storage, and object storage (S3)
- Experience deploying and troubleshooting applications on Kubernetes with Helm and contributing to repeatable, reviewable infrastructure changes using Terraform or similar IaC tools
- Experience improving reliability, observability, maintainability, and on-call readiness of backend services, and diagnosing issues across application, data, orchestration, and infrastructure layers
- 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
- Ability to learn and apply new languages, tools, and frameworks as needed (Ruby, Go, TypeScript, Vue) with excellent written communication and asynchronous collaboration skills
