Principal Software Engineer, Group Tenant Scale

Job Description

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

Group Tenant Scale (GTS) is re-architecting GitLab.com into a modern, distributed SaaS platform. Today, GitLab.com runs as a single massive multi-tenant instance. Tomorrow, it will be made up of Cells (self-contained clusters) and Organizations (logical groupings of tenants), supported by OrgMover (seamless migration tooling).

This transformation will make GitLab.com horizontally scalable, resilient, and flexibleso customers of every size experience high reliability, global reach, and freedom to grow with GitLab.

As a Principal Engineer, you'll shape the technical foundation of GitLab's future SaaS. You'll drive the design of distributed systems at scale, influence architectural strategy across engineering, and partner with leaders to align infrastructure with business outcomes. This is career-defining work that impacts every GitLab customer.

What You'll Do

- Lead architecture and design for Cells, Organizations and OrgMover, enabling Postgres sharding, zero-downtime migrations, and global SaaS scalability and regionality.
- Solve complex distributed systems challenges: tenant isolation, regional distribution, multi-region replication, observability, fault tolerance, and migrations.
- Partner across infrastructure, product, and executive teams to ensure our SaaS evolution aligns with both technical excellence and business needs.
- Translate architectural tradeoffs into clear direction for engineering managers, senior engineers, and executives.
- Mentor and elevate engineers across teams, raising the bar for technical leadership and inclusive collaboration.
- Provide thought leadership inside and outside GitLab on SaaS scaling, distributed systems, and platform reliability.

What You'll Bring

- Extensive experience designing, developing, migrating, scaling, and operating large distributed systems in a SaaS context.
- Hands-on programming experience in Ruby and/or Go, with the ability to dive into code, review implementations, and guide technical design.
- Proven track record leading transformations from monolithic to distributed architectures, ideally including Postgres sharding or other database partitioning strategies.
- Hands-on expertise with service communication and observability at scale (e.g. service mesh/Istio, Kafka, tracing/metrics).
- Principal-level technical leadership: ability to set strategy, influence across organizations, and mentor principal and senior engineers.
- Balance of infrastructure depth and application architecture awareness; skilled at making system-level tradeoffs that prioritize reliability and customer experience.
- Excellent communication skills; able to make complex systems understandable to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Bonus: Experience in regulated or high-reliability domains (finance, healthcare, government, telecom).

About The Team

Group Tenant Scale (GTS) is re-architecting GitLab.com into the next-generation multi-tenant SaaS platform. It will be horizontally scalable, reliable, and flexible. We are building this through Cells (infrastructure-level sharding), Organizations (application-level tenant grouping), and extensions of Geo to enable replication and cross-platform migrations.

Our goal is to give every customer a rock-solid experience: high availability, strong resiliency, global performance, and the ability to move seamlessly between multi-tenant and single-tenant offerings as their needs evolve.

What began as a small team tackling foundational projects has grown into dedicated engineering groups, including Geo, that are working together to deliver the future of GitLab's multi-tenant platform.

As part of this team, you will be at the center of one of the most impactful transformations in GitLab's history. You will help reshape GitLab.com into a cloud-scale SaaS platform that powers the next decade of growth, while collaborating with some of the best engineers in distributed systems, mentoring others, and leaving a lasting architectural legacy.

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.

The base salary range for this role's listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range

$157,900$338,400 USD

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 location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.

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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.