Site Reliability Engineer, Cells Infrastructure - GitLab

About 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.

Overview

We're looking for an Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer to join the Cells Infrastructure team in GitLab's Scale & Architecture organization. In this role, you'll help build and operate Cells, the architecture that lets GitLab.com scale horizontally. Cells splits GitLab.com into many independent units, each with its own application and data stack, behind a shared routing layer.

This is a build-it-and-run-it role. You'll provision cells, route traffic to them, deploy them safely, and keep them reliable in production. You'll also help move customer organizations onto Cells, one of GitLab's most important scaling initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Operate Cells in production: join the on-call rotation, respond to incidents, lead post-incident reviews, and drive corrective actions to completion.
• Define and monitor service level objectives (SLOs) for routing and cell health, and build the dashboards, alerts, and runbooks behind them.
• Provision and operate cell infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including Kubernetes, networking, Identity and Access Management (IAM), PostgreSQL, Redis, and object storage.
• Develop infrastructure as code with Terraform, Helm, and GitOps tooling such as Argo CD.
• Operate and extend the global routing layer, built on Cloudflare Workers, Envoy, and a Go service backed by Cloud Spanner, and expand routing to more protocols and services.
• Improve the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines behind ring-based deployments, covering promotion, database migrations, quality assurance validation, and rollback.
• Support organization migrations by preparing destination cells and helping with dry runs and production cutovers.
• Work with product teams to make their services cell-compatible, and write documentation so others can operate Cells with confidence.

Requirements

• Professional experience running production infrastructure at scale on AWS, GCP, or both, including Kubernetes, along with strong Terraform and Helm skills.
• Proficiency in Go, or strong experience in another systems language and willingness to work in Go daily.
• Solid grounding in site reliability engineering (SRE) best practices: SLOs and error budgets, blameless post-incident reviews, reducing toil through automation, capacity planning, and designing for graceful degradation.
• Experience owning services in production, including on-call, incident response, and monitoring with tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Practical knowledge of progressive delivery: how to roll changes safely across a fleet and how to roll them back.
• A strong understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, such as request routing, proxies, consistency, and failure domains.
• Experience working effectively in distributed, all-remote teams: you default to asynchronous, written-first communication, document decisions in issues and merge requests, hand off work cleanly across time zones, and stay transparent about progress and blockers.
• Experience with Cloudflare, Spanner, Argo CD, TypeScript, or operating GitLab at scale is a plus, not a requirement.

About the Team

Every team in our organization owns its services end to end, from design through on-call. We own the control plane that tracks cells and decides where each request belongs, and keep the fleet in step with GitLab's release cadence. We work closely with delivery, database, migration, and product teams across GitLab. Feature teams own how their services behave on the platform; we own the underlying infrastructure. We're an all-remote, asynchronous team. We make decisions in GitLab issues, use directly responsible individuals (DRIs) to own technical direction, demo our work weekly, and use AI-assisted workflows every day.