Principal Software Engineer, Group Tenant Scale

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 flexible—so 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

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