Senior Platform Engineer, GitLab Orbit - GitLab

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.

An overview of this role

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.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and operate GitLab Orbit backend services, primarily in Rust, within a distributed, cloud-native environment.
• 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 AWS or GCP.
• Automate recurring operational work and build tools that make deployments, upgrades, recovery, capacity management, and service maintenance safer and more efficient.
• Strengthen observability across application, data, orchestration, and infrastructure layers by improving metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, and service-level indicators.
• Investigate production issues, address underlying causes, and write backend code that handles 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 and Model Context Protocol (MCP) surfaces.
• Design reliable, scalable, and cost-aware data workflows using systems such as Amazon 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.

What you’ll bring

• Experience designing, building, and operating production backend services with strong Rust skills or clear evidence that you can 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 such as Amazon S3.
• Experience deploying and troubleshooting applications on Kubernetes with Helm and contributing to infrastructure changes using Terraform or similar IaC tools.
• Experience improving the reliability, observability, maintainability, and on-call readiness of backend services.
• Strong system design skills, including making and explaining architectural decisions, documenting constraints, and aligning trade-offs with product and platform needs.
• Excellent written communication and asynchronous collaboration skills demonstrated through thoughtful code review, mentoring, and context sharing.