Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Database Operations:Clickhouse

Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Database Operations

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 the rate of human progress. This mission is integral to our culture, influencing how we hire, build products, and lead our industry. We make this possible at GitLab by running our operations on our product and staying aligned with our values. Learn more about Life at GitLab.

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are responsible for keeping all user-facing services and other GitLab production systems running smoothly 24x7x365. SREs are a blend of pragmatic operators and software craftspeople that apply sound engineering principles, operational discipline, and mature automation to our environments and the GitLab codebase. We specialize in systems, whether it be networking, the Linux kernel, or some more specific interest in scaling, algorithms, or distributed systems, along these functions:

• Design, build, and maintain ClickHouse and PostgreSQL clusters to support high-demand, enterprise-scale workloads.
• Provision and Orchestrate cloud infrastructure using configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef), IaC (Terraform) and the Kubernetes ecosystem (Helm charts, Operators) and distributed consensus (etcd) in GCP
• Design and implement enterprise-grade, high-availability ClickHouse solutions with ClickHouse Keeper, sharding, and replication, optimized for large-scale and dynamic datasets.
• Optimize and scale high-transaction PostgreSQL clusters with Patroni and streaming replication for GitLab’s core applications on GCP
• Build and maintain early warning systems, monitoring, and alerting tools (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana) to predict capacity needs, monitor query latency and replication lag, and ensure resource optimization across platforms.
• Enable cross-database integrations and workflows, such as ClickHouse-to-PostgreSQL data federation, CDC, and logical replication, to support hybrid analytics.
• Respond to platform alerts, user emergencies, and support requests while ensuring strict adherence to SLOs, including during SRE on-call rotations.
• Enhance infrastructure security by implementing and updating measures that protect GitLab’s systems and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, FedRAMP, SOC2, ISO).
• Partner with internal and external compliance assessors as Subject Matter Experts during certifications and recertifications.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to address architectural bottlenecks, plan service rollouts and migrations, and shape the future roadmap while maintaining strong operational readiness.

The Database Operations Engineer at GitLab is responsible for the Building, Running and Owning and Evolving of the entire lifecycle of database engines for GitLab.com.  See Database Operations team page for details.

The Team

We are a globally distributed team of five, spanning EMEA, APAC, and the Americas, with plans to grow further. Our mission is to ensure the reliability and continuous evolution of the database infrastructure behind GitLab.com and beyond. GitLab’s CREDIT values guide our behavior and are deeply woven into the fabric of our daily work.

Mandatory technical skills and experience

1. Advanced database platform management experience, preferably using Postgres and Clickhouse at scale
2. Advanced Cloud Infrastructure automation and management, preferably using Ansible, Chef, Terraform, Helm charts, Operators and Kubernetes
3. Solid experience with at least one programming language:  Go, Ruby or Python
4. Advanced experience with Linux
5. Extensive on-call experience as an SRE supporting mission critical systems
6. Solid incident management experience, across all phases:  Analysis, Remediation, RCA and Corrective Actions
7. Solid experience implementing monitoring at scale (preferably Prometheus and Grafana)

Mandatory non-technical skills, experience and characteristics

1. Willingness and ability to live and promote Gitlab's unique CREDIT Values in one's day to day work and interactions with teammates.
2. Superior verbal and written communication skills
3. Cool, collected and composed under pressure
4. Comfortable and productive working asynchronously across timezones and cultures, at the speed and scale of business.
5. Enable others to excel
6. Be a Leader of One
7. Act Like an Owner with Gitlab's resources.

How GitLab will support you

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• All remote, asynchronous work environment
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and development budget
• Parental leave
• Home office support

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.