Senior Backend Engineer, Gitlab Delivery: Runway (platform Engineering)

GitLab GitLab · Enterprise · NA · Platforms Engineering

Senior Backend Engineer on the Runway team, responsible for the design, evolution, and operation of the Kubernetes-based platform and developer tooling that powers GitLab's engineering organization. This includes operating production Kubernetes clusters, scaling GitOps workflows, and setting infrastructure-as-code practices. The role also involves mentoring engineers, influencing architectural decisions, and driving platform improvements for reliability, observability, and security.

What you'd actually do

  1. Manage and evolve production-grade Kubernetes clusters across cloud environments, contributing to architectural decisions on upgrades, scaling, disaster recovery, and reliability improvements.
  2. Implement and maintain GitOps workflows using ArgoCD, including Application Sets, sync policies, and deployment standards, and share best practices with teams adopting these patterns.
  3. Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules that enable safe, repeatable cloud infrastructure provisioning, including state management and drift detection practices.
  4. Lead incident response, drive post-mortems to clear conclusions, and implement improvements to availability, performance, and resilience as part of on-call rotation.
  5. Partner with application teams to onboard services onto the platform, writing documentation, runbooks, and self-service tooling that improves developer productivity.

Skills

Required

  • Go
  • Kubernetes
  • GitOps
  • ArgoCD
  • Terraform
  • Cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • Networking fundamentals
  • Incident response
  • Documentation
  • System design

Nice to have

  • Python
  • Bash

What the JD emphasized

  • production-grade Kubernetes clusters
  • GitOps workflows
  • infrastructure as code
  • networking fundamentals
  • well-structured, independently driven work
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills