Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer, Database Operations
Offer summary
Qualifications:
Experience managing PostgreSQL in large-scale production environments., Strong understanding of SQL and PL/pgSQL., Hands-on experience with infrastructure automation tools like Ansible, Terraform, or Chef., Proactive attitude with excellent communication skills in English..Key responsibilities:
- Automate operational tasks such as updates and configuration changes.
- Respond to platform emergencies and support escalations.
- Develop and maintain automated observability and capacity planning systems.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize database performance and reliability.
Job description
GitLab is an opencore software company that develops the most comprehensive AIpowered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and cocreate 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 whats 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 highperformance 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. Cocreate the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.
Int. Site Reliability Engineer: Database Operations
The Database Operations team’s mission is to build, run, own and evolve the entire lifecycle of the PostgreSQL database engine for GitLab.com. The team is focused on owning the reliability, scalability, evolution, performance & security of the database engine and its supporting services. The team should be seeking to build their services on top of Reliability::Foundations services and cloud vendor managed products, where appropriate, to reduce complexity, improve efficiency and deliver new capabilities quicker.
Responsibilities - Automating every operational task is a core requirement for this role. For example, package updates, configuration changes across all environments, creating tools for automatic provisioning of user facing services, etc.
-
- Responding to platform emergencies, alerts, and escalations from Customer Support.
-
- Ensure systems exist to manage software lifecycles (e.g. Operating Systems) with a minimum of manual effort.
-
- Develop a fully automated multienvironment observability stack based on the existing SaaS system, and extend it to predict capacity needs based on the usage patterns.
-
- Plan for new service rollouts, expansion and capacity management of existing services, and work with users to optimize their resource consumption.
-
As an SRE you will:
- Work on database reliability and performance aspects for GitLab.com from within the SRE team as well as work on shipping solutions with the product.
-
- Analyze solutions and implement best practices for our PostgreSQL database clusters and its components.
-
- Work on observability of relevant database metrics and make sure we reach our database objectives.
-
- Work with peer SREs to roll out changes to our production environment and help mitigate databaserelated production incidents.
-
- OnCall support on rotation with the team.
-
- Provide database expertise to engineering teams (for example through reviews of database migrations, queries and performance optimizations).
-
- Work on automation of database infrastructure and help engineering succeed by providing selfservice tools.
-
- Use the GitLab product to run GitLab.com as a first resort and improve the product as much as possible.
-
- Plan the growth of GitLabs database infrastructure.
-
- Design, build and maintain core database infrastructure components that allow GitLab to scale to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
-
- Support and debug database production issues across services and levels of the stack.
-
- Make monitoring and alerting alert on symptoms and not on outages.
-
- Document every action so your learnings turn into repeatable actions and then into automation.
-
You may be a fit to this role if you:
- Have primary experience running PostgreSQL in highgrowth, large production environments using both selfmanaged (VM, Kubernetes with modern PostgreSQL Operators) as well DBaaS services.
-
- Have handson experience using data from PostgreSQL internals to design, build and troubleshoot systems.
-
- Have primary experience with infrastructure automation, orchestration and configuration management (Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform)
-
- Have solid understanding of SQL and PLpgSQL
-
- Significant experience working in a Large SaaS distributed Systems production environment
-
- Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
-
- Have excellent written and verbal English communication skills, with an urge to collaborate and communicate asynchronously.
-
- Have an urge to document all the things so you dont need to learn the same thing twice, and an urge for delivering quickly and iterating fast.
-
- Have a proactive, goforit attitude. When you see something broken, you cant help but fix it
-
- Solid data modeling and data structure design skills
-
- Bonus: Solid programming skills as a (former) backend engineer Preferably with Ruby andor Go.
-
- Bonus: Experience with Clickhouse, or other modern OLAP database.
-
Projects you could work on:
- Review, analyze and implement solutions regarding database administration (e.g., backups, performance tuning)
-
- Work with Ansible, Terraform, Chef and other tools to build mature automation (automate setup of new replicas or testing and monitoring of backups).
-
- Implement selfservice tools for our engineers using GitLab ChatOps.
-
- Provide technical assistance and support to other teams on database and databaserelated application design methodologies, system resources, application tuning.
-
- Review database related changes from engineering teams (e.g., database migrations).
-
- Recommend query and schema changes to optimize the performance of database queries.
-
- Jump on a production incident to mitigate databaserelated issues on GitLab.com.
-
- Participate actively in the infrastructure design and scalability considerations focusing on data storage aspects.
-
- Make sure we know how to take the next step to scale the database.
-
- Design and develop specifications for future database requirements including enhancements, upgrades, and capacity planning; evaluate alternatives; and make appropriate recommendations.
-
Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer Criteria
Technical:
- Expertise in at least 1 area of SRE work, with general knowledge of all areas.
-
- Capable of mentoring Junior team members.
-
- Contributes small improvements to the GitLab codebase to resolve issues.
-
Execution:
- Identifies projects that result in substantial cost savings or revenue
-
- Identifies changes for the product architecture from the reliability, performance and availability perspective with a data driven approach.
-
- Proactively work on the efficiency and capacity planning to set clear requirements and reduce the system resources usage to make GitLab cheaper to run for all our customers.
-
- Identify parts of the system that do not scale, provides immediate palliative measures and drives long term resolution of these incidents.
-
- Identify Service Level Indicators (SLIs) that will align the team to meet the availability and latency objectives.
-
Collaboration and Communication:
- Ability to thrive in a fully remote, asynchronous work environment that places a high emphasis on documentation and written communication.
-
- Develop expertise in a domain and radiate that knowledge
-
- Participate in blameless RCAs on incidents and outages, looking for answers that will prevent the incident from ever happening again.
-
Influence and Maturity:
- Lead Junior SREs by setting the example.
-
- Develop ownership of a major part of the infrastructure.
-
- Trusted to deescalate conflicts inside the team
-
Performance Indicators
Site Reliability Engineers have the following jobfamily performance indicators:
- GitLab.com Availability
-
- GitLab.com Performance
-
- Apdex and Error SLO per Service
-
- Mean Time to Detection
-
- Mean Time to Resolution
-
- Mean Time Between Failure
-
- Mean Time to Production
-
- Disaster Recovery Time to Recovery
-
Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific locationbased eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.
Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.
GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.
- Automating every operational task is a core requirement for this role. For example, package updates, configuration changes across all environments, creating tools for automatic provisioning of user facing services, etc.
- Responding to platform emergencies, alerts, and escalations from Customer Support.
- Ensure systems exist to manage software lifecycles (e.g. Operating Systems) with a minimum of manual effort.
- Develop a fully automated multienvironment observability stack based on the existing SaaS system, and extend it to predict capacity needs based on the usage patterns.
- Plan for new service rollouts, expansion and capacity management of existing services, and work with users to optimize their resource consumption.
-
- Work on database reliability and performance aspects for GitLab.com from within the SRE team as well as work on shipping solutions with the product.
- Analyze solutions and implement best practices for our PostgreSQL database clusters and its components.
- Work on observability of relevant database metrics and make sure we reach our database objectives.
- Work with peer SREs to roll out changes to our production environment and help mitigate databaserelated production incidents.
- OnCall support on rotation with the team.
- Provide database expertise to engineering teams (for example through reviews of database migrations, queries and performance optimizations).
- Work on automation of database infrastructure and help engineering succeed by providing selfservice tools.
- Use the GitLab product to run GitLab.com as a first resort and improve the product as much as possible.
- Plan the growth of GitLabs database infrastructure.
- Design, build and maintain core database infrastructure components that allow GitLab to scale to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
- Support and debug database production issues across services and levels of the stack.
- Make monitoring and alerting alert on symptoms and not on outages.
- Document every action so your learnings turn into repeatable actions and then into automation.
-
- Have primary experience running PostgreSQL in highgrowth, large production environments using both selfmanaged (VM, Kubernetes with modern PostgreSQL Operators) as well DBaaS services.
- Have handson experience using data from PostgreSQL internals to design, build and troubleshoot systems.
- Have primary experience with infrastructure automation, orchestration and configuration management (Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform)
- Have solid understanding of SQL and PLpgSQL
- Significant experience working in a Large SaaS distributed Systems production environment
- Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
- Have excellent written and verbal English communication skills, with an urge to collaborate and communicate asynchronously.
- Have an urge to document all the things so you dont need to learn the same thing twice, and an urge for delivering quickly and iterating fast.
- Have a proactive, goforit attitude. When you see something broken, you cant help but fix it
- Solid data modeling and data structure design skills
- Bonus: Solid programming skills as a (former) backend engineer Preferably with Ruby andor Go.
- Bonus: Experience with Clickhouse, or other modern OLAP database.
-
- Review, analyze and implement solutions regarding database administration (e.g., backups, performance tuning)
- Work with Ansible, Terraform, Chef and other tools to build mature automation (automate setup of new replicas or testing and monitoring of backups).
- Implement selfservice tools for our engineers using GitLab ChatOps.
- Provide technical assistance and support to other teams on database and databaserelated application design methodologies, system resources, application tuning.
- Review database related changes from engineering teams (e.g., database migrations).
- Recommend query and schema changes to optimize the performance of database queries.
- Jump on a production incident to mitigate databaserelated issues on GitLab.com.
- Participate actively in the infrastructure design and scalability considerations focusing on data storage aspects.
- Make sure we know how to take the next step to scale the database.
- Design and develop specifications for future database requirements including enhancements, upgrades, and capacity planning; evaluate alternatives; and make appropriate recommendations.
-
- Expertise in at least 1 area of SRE work, with general knowledge of all areas.
- Capable of mentoring Junior team members.
- Contributes small improvements to the GitLab codebase to resolve issues.
-
- Identifies projects that result in substantial cost savings or revenue
- Identifies changes for the product architecture from the reliability, performance and availability perspective with a data driven approach.
- Proactively work on the efficiency and capacity planning to set clear requirements and reduce the system resources usage to make GitLab cheaper to run for all our customers.
- Identify parts of the system that do not scale, provides immediate palliative measures and drives long term resolution of these incidents.
- Identify Service Level Indicators (SLIs) that will align the team to meet the availability and latency objectives.
-
- Ability to thrive in a fully remote, asynchronous work environment that places a high emphasis on documentation and written communication.
- Develop expertise in a domain and radiate that knowledge
- Participate in blameless RCAs on incidents and outages, looking for answers that will prevent the incident from ever happening again.
-
- Lead Junior SREs by setting the example.
- Develop ownership of a major part of the infrastructure.
- Trusted to deescalate conflicts inside the team
-
- GitLab.com Availability
- GitLab.com Performance
- Apdex and Error SLO per Service
- Mean Time to Detection
- Mean Time to Resolution
- Mean Time Between Failure
- Mean Time to Production
- Disaster Recovery Time to Recovery
-
Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific locationbased eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.
Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.
GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.
Performance Indicators
Site Reliability Engineers have the following jobfamily performance indicators:
Influence and Maturity:
Collaboration and Communication:
Execution:
Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer Criteria
Technical:
Projects you could work on:
You may be a fit to this role if you:
As an SRE you will:
Required profile
Experience
Hard Skills
Other Skills
- Mentorship
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Problem Solving
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