Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer, Environment Automation

An overview of this role

As a Site Reliability Engineer at GitLab, you’ll keep our user-facing services and production systems running smoothly by blending software engineering with infrastructure expertise. Our SREs are pragmatic operators and skilled developers who bring sound engineering principles, operational discipline, and thoughtful automation to everything they touch. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable debugging Go applications and designing scalable Terraform automation across hundreds of environments. You're the go-to for complex production issues, combining deep technical investigation with a developer’s mindset and an operator’s precision.

In the Environment Automation specialization, your focus is on operating and automating hundreds of GitLab environments—from initial provisioning to day-to-day maintenance tasks.

Unlike other SRE roles, this position centers on automating the lifecycle of many tenant environments, ensuring they remain secure, consistent, and reliable at scale.

Some examples of the projects you could work on:

• Designing infrastructure automation that provisions and operates GitLab environments using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes
• Creating and maintaining deployment packages for GitLab, such as Helm Charts and omnibus-gitlab
• Building and operating Dedicated GitLab instances integrated with cloud-native services (e.g., GCP, AWS)
• Developing tools to orchestrate infrastructure-as-code workflows across multiple tenants
• Deploying and managing microservices on Kubernetes clusters at scale
• Enhancing GitLab’s observability stack (e.g., Prometheus, ELK) to support proactive monitoring and incident response
• Integrating with and operating infrastructure in cloud provider ecosystems (e.g., IAM, networking, storage)
• Championing and implementing cloud security best practices across automated infrastructure

What You'll Do

• Support Environment Automation at Scale: Contribute to automating the provisioning, configuration, and management of GitLab environments using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes. Follow best practices to support infrastructure across many tenants with guidance from senior team members.
• Assist in Debugging Production Issues: Investigate and troubleshoot issues in Kubernetes clusters and GitLab services. Help resolve common problems such as failed deployments, pod crashes, and scheduling conflicts using tools like kubectl.
• Contribute to IaC and CI/CD Workflows: Write and maintain Terraform modules and scripts to automate routine operations. Participate in improving CI/CD pipelines for safe and repeatable infrastructure changes.
• Participate in Monitoring and Maintenance: Help monitor environment health using tools like Prometheus, ELK, and Grafana. Assist in improving observability and capacity tracking for tenant environments.
• Respond to Incidents and Alerts: Take part in the incident response process, helping triage alerts, document issues, and support resolution efforts under the guidance of senior engineers.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Work with Infrastructure and Development teams to contribute to solutions that improve platform reliability and operational efficiency.

What You'll Bring

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code: Familiarity with Terraform and Ansible to manage cloud infrastructure. Able to work with modules and understand the basics of state and variable use.
• Kubernetes Fundamentals: Experience using kubectl, Helm, or Kustomize to interact with Kubernetes clusters. Understands core concepts such as pods, deployments, and rollouts.
• Basic Programming Skills: Able to read and modify infrastructure tooling written in Go, Ruby, or similar languages.
• Exposure to Multi-Environment Operations: Experience working with multiple environments or customer setups, even if not at full scale. Understands the challenges of managing consistency and isolation.
• Monitoring and Troubleshooting Skills: Familiar with basic observability tools and logs. Can identify service issues using dashboards or metrics and escalate appropriately.
• Collaborative Mindset: Works well in cross-functional teams. Eager to learn from others, share knowledge, and contribute to team success.
• On-Call Experience: Has participated in on-call rotations for production systems and is comfortable responding to alerts, triaging incidents, and collaborating during recovery efforts.

About the team

GitLab’s Dedicated team, where the SRE Environment Automation role sits, is on a mission to deliver a fully managed, single-tenant GitLab experience through the GitLab Dedicated platform. Our goal is to eliminate manual operations across the entire lifecycle of customer environments, including provisioning, upgrades, security, and monitoring, so customers can focus on unlocking the full potential of The One DevOps Platform without managing the underlying infrastructure. We build scalable, automated systems that ensure each GitLab Dedicated instance is secure, consistent, and production-ready—whether we're managing 10 environments or hundreds.