Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Database Operations

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are responsible for keeping all user-facing services and other GitLab production systems running smoothly. 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 Databases, the Linux kernel, or some more specific interest in scaling, algorithms, or distributed systems.

The Database Operations Team mission is to build, run, own and evolve the entire lifecycle of the PostgreSQL database engine for GitLab.com. The team is focused on owning the reliability, scalability, performance & security of the database engine and its supporting services. The team should be seeking to build their services on top of Reliability::Foundations services and cloud vendor managed products, where appropriate, to reduce complexity, improve efficiency and deliver new capabilities at scale and at the speed of business.

GitLab.com is a unique site and it brings unique challenges–it’s the biggest GitLab instance in existence. In fact, it’s one of the largest single-tenancy open-source SaaS sites in the world.. The experience of our team feeds back into other engineering groups within the company, as well as to GitLab customers running Dedicated, Self-Managed  and future Cells installations.

Responsibilities

• Automating every operational task is a core requirement for this role. For example, package updates, configuration changes across all environments, creating tools for automatic provisioning of user facing services, etc.
• Responding to platform emergencies, alerts, and escalations from Customer Support.
• Ensure systems exist to manage software life-cycles (e.g. Operating Systems) with a minimum of manual effort.
• Develop a fully automated multi-environment observability stack based on the existing SaaS system, and extend it to predict capacity needs based on the usage patterns.
• Plan for new service roll-outs, expansion and capacity management of existing services, and work with users to optimize their resource consumption.
  

As an SRE you will:

• Function as an SRE in building solutions in service of the Database Operations team’s mission and goals.
• Work with large databases in a dynamic and growth-oriented environment.  Many interesting and challenging problems await solutions.
• Work on database reliability and performance aspects for GitLab.com from within the Database Operations team as well as work on shipping solutions with the product.
• Analyze solutions and implement best practices for our main PostgreSQL database clusters and its components.
• Work on observability of relevant database metrics and make sure we reach our database objectives.
• Work with partner  DBREs and peer SREs to roll out changes to our production environment and help mitigate database-related production incidents.
• On-Call support on rotation with the team.
• Provide database subject-matter expertise to engineering teams (for example through reviews of database migrations, queries and performance optimizations).
• Work on automation of database infrastructure and help engineering succeed by providing self-service tools.
• Use the GitLab product to run GitLab.com as a first resort and improve the product as much as possible.
• Plan the growth of GitLab's database infrastructure.
• Support and debug database production issues across services and levels of the stack.
• Make monitoring and alerting alert on symptoms and not on outages.
• Document every action so your learnings turn into repeatable actions and then into automation.

You may be a fit to this role if you:

• Have extensive experience as an SRE supporting database operations teams.
• Have strong experience running PostgreSQL at scale in large production environments.
• Have strong experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management (Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform…)
• Have solid understanding of SQL and PL/pgSQL
• Significant experience working in a Large SaaS distributed Systems production environment
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
• Have an urge to document all the things so you don't need to learn the same thing twice, and an urge for delivering quickly and iterating fast.
• Have a proactive, go-for-it attitude. When you see something broken, you can't help but fix it
• Strong data modeling and data structure design skills
• Bonus: Strong programming skills as a (former) backend engineer - Preferably with Ruby and/or Go.

Projects you could work on:

• Review, analyze and implement solutions regarding database administration (e.g., backups, performance tuning)
• Work with Terraform, Chef, Ansible and other tools to build mature automation (automatic setup of new replicas or testing and monitoring of backups).
• Implement self-service tools for our engineers using GitLab ChatOps.
• Provide technical assistance and support to other teams on database and database-related application design methodologies, system resources, application tuning.
• Review database related changes from engineering teams (e.g., database migrations).
• Recommend query and schema changes to optimize the performance of database queries.
• Jump on a production incident to mitigate database-related issues on GitLab.com.
• Participate actively in the infrastructure design and scalability considerations focusing on data storage aspects.
• Make sure we know how to take the next step to scale the database.
• Design and develop specifications for future database requirements including enhancements, upgrades, and capacity planning; evaluate alternatives; and make appropriate recommendations.

Performance Indicators

Site Reliability Engineers have the following job-family performance indicators:

• GitLab.com Availability
• GitLab.com Performance
• Apdex and Error SLO per Service
• Mean Time to Detection
• Mean Time to Resolution
• Mean Time Between Failure
• Mean Time to Production
• Disaster Recovery Time to Recovery

• 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.