Distribution Engineer - Distribution Deploy Team
GitLabAbout the role
The GitLab DevSecOps platform empowers 100,000+ organizations to deliver software faster and more efficiently. We are one of the world’s largest all-remote companies with 2,000+ team members and values that foster a culture where people embrace the belief that everyone can contribute. Learn more about Life at GitLab.
An overview of this role
As a Distribution Engineer, your work within the Distribution: Deploy team surrounds configuration, deployment, and operation of GitLab as a whole product. The goal is to deliver an intuitive, clear, and frictionless installation experience, followed by smooth, seamless upgrade and maintenance processes for deployments of any scale. We strive to deliver ongoing operational behaviors for scaling, little to zero downtime upgrades, and highly reliable experiences for not only instance administrators but their users. Omnibus packages, Helm Charts and Operators are primary deployment methods Distribution currently supports.
As a Distribution Engineer on the Distribution: Deploy team you regularly interface with broader development teams in supporting newly created features.
Some interesting links about the team and role
- Our primary projects
- Our work with the community
- Our Demo video’s
What you’ll do
- Build and maintain tools for initial installation and composability for self-managed installations and GitLab.com
- Productize Upgrades / Downgrades from a single node installation to large scale enterprise installation
- Secure configuration & communication
- Research and document cloud and platform migration and integration
- Investigate and analyze installation and upgrade incidents, identify root cause, and develop appropriate mitigation strategies and fixes
What you’ll bring
- Production experience designing, building, and packaging cloud-native applications.
- Experience with the Kubernetes ecosystem (Operators, Helm, registries, etc.).
- Experience with high-level programming languages (GoLang, Ruby, Python, Shell, etc.).
- Production experience with IaC and orchestration tooling at scale (Ansible, Terraform, Chef, etc.).
- Knowledge of service scaling and rollout strategies.
- Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.
- User of modern DevOps platforms. (GitLab is a bonus.)
About the team
The Distribution team is composed of two subgroups: Distribution:Build and Distribution:Deploy.
The Build team is focused on producing artifacts including system packages, container images, and related components like marketplace listings along with tooling required to create and maintain them. The Deploy team is focused on installation and upgrade mechanisms to ensure smooth deployments. This includes system integration, scripting, templating, and related configuration management tooling.
In addition to product deliverables, both groups review a large number of MR's authored outside the team. These include dependency and security updates along with configuration controls and other bundled components like PostgreSQL, Consul, Patroni. Deployments include everything from single node deployments for evaluating GitLab all the way through the 50K user reference architecture and beyond. The primary goal is to ensure end users have a high-speed, low-friction experience when managing GitLab with limited downtime or service disruptions.