Principal Engineer, Infrastructure Platforms

About GitLab

GitLab is an open-core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating human progress. Our platform unites teams and organizations, breaking down barriers and redefining what's possible in software development. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise and Duo Agent Platform, customers get AI benefits at every stage of the SDLC.

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. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

An Overview of this Role

GitLab is seeking a Principal Engineer, Infrastructure Platforms to set technical direction for our most critical infrastructure platforms. This role operates at organizational scale, owning architecture, solving complex systems problems, and driving initiatives that shape how GitLab grows, performs, and remains reliable.

As a Principal Engineer, you will serve as a technical authority and force multiplier, leading architectural decisions across distributed and cloud-native systems to translate business strategy into durable technical direction. Spanning multiple teams and domains, you will bring clarity to ambiguity, raise engineering standards, and mentor senior talent while remaining accountable for real production outcomes. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for leaders who drive success through influence and shape the foundational platforms that the entire organization depends on.

Organizational Focus Areas

Principal Engineers at GitLab drive strategy across our most critical infrastructure and delivery groups. Role placement across the following tracks is determined by business need and organizational priority:

Production Engineering (Infrastructure Platforms)

• Core Focus: Lead strategy and execution of our multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure in collaboration with other Platform teams.
• Collaboration: Partner with Database Operations and Cells teams to align production engineering efforts with the overall platform strategy.

Group Tenant Scale (GTS)

• Core Focus: Lead the design and evolution of projects that enable our distributed, multi-tenant SaaS transformation, including Cells, Organizations, and OrgMover.
• Distributed Architecture: Architect for zero downtime, transparent relocation, and application hardening in a massive distributed environment.
• Strategic Decisions: Guide architecture decisions with availability, reliability, resiliency, performance, and cost in mind.

GitLab Delivery

• Core Focus: Lead the platform strategy spanning Developer Experience, CI infrastructure, packaging, and release delivery across SaaS, Self-Managed, and Dedicated.
• Developer Experience: Treat GitLab engineers as customers, building self-service tooling, testing infrastructure, and paved paths that increase velocity while maintaining quality.
• Delivery at Scale: Architect reliable, automated pipelines that streamline how GitLab is packaged, released, and deployed across all platforms and offerings.

What You'll Do

• Own and drive the architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms that support GitLab at global scale.
• Lead the design and evolution of large platforms and distributed systems that are scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-efficient.
• Serve as the technical authority on complex initiatives, guiding decisions that impact multiple teams and product areas.
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps and execution plans.
• Drive alignment across engineering, product, and leadership by clearly communicating tradeoffs and recommendations.
• Establish technical standards and architectural patterns that raise quality and consistency across the organization.
• Be accountable for production outcomes, including reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a force multiplier through influence rather than direct authority.
• Operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces where both the problem and the solution need to be defined.

What You'll Bring

• Proven experience designing and evolving large-scale platforms or distributed systems in cloud-native environments.
• Strong proficiency in Golang and/or Ruby, with the ability to contribute to, review, and guide core architectural changes in production codebases.
• Strong architectural judgment, including the ability to balance scalability, reliability, performance, security, and cost.
• Experience owning platform-level technical decisions that impacted multiple teams or an entire engineering domain.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes-based environments as a production platform, including how they influence system design, deployment models, reliability, and operational complexity.
• Experience being accountable for production systems, not just design recommendations.
• Ability to author and drive long-term technical strategy and multi-month roadmaps.
• Track record of leading through influence and shaping technical direction without direct authority.
• Comfort making high-impact technical decisions, including build vs buy vs partner tradeoffs.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.

About The Team

The Principal Engineer, Infrastructure Platforms role sits within GitLab’s Infrastructure Platforms organization, working across multiple teams to shape how our platform scales and operates. This group is responsible for some of GitLab’s most critical systems, including the multi-tenant SaaS platform, core delivery pipelines, and the underlying infrastructure that powers millions of users. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll define technical direction, guide architectural decisions, and ensure our platforms remain resilient, performant, and modern. The team operates fully remotely and collaborates asynchronously across time zones, grounded in GitLab’s values of transparency, autonomy, and open communication. You’ll help the organization tackle complex distributed systems challenges at scale while mentoring other engineers and building a culture focused on reliability, efficiency, and continuous improvement.

Key skills/competency

• Cloud-native environments
• Distributed systems architecture
• Kubernetes
• Golang / Ruby
• SaaS infrastructure
• Technical leadership
• Scalability & reliability
• DevSecOps Platform
• CI/CD
• Architectural decision-making