Senior Platform Engineer, GitLab Orbit

Overview

As a Senior Platform Engineer on the Orbit team, you'll help build and scale GitLab Orbit, a high-impact knowledge graph data service that supports agents, analytics, and architecture-level features across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments. You'll join a small, senior, Rust-first team and focus on how backend code behaves within a distributed, cloud-native system, making graph capabilities reliable, observable, secure, and easy for other teams and agents to use.

In this role, you'll own meaningful parts of the service end to end. You'll design and implement backend services, data workflows, and interfaces while improving multi-tenant behavior, performance, resilience, and operational readiness.

In your first year, you'll take ownership of improving how GitLab Orbit runs in production, with a focus on operational automation, observability, incident readiness, and distributed-system reliability.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate GitLab Orbit backend services, primarily in Rust, within a distributed, cloud-native environment.
• Improve the deployment, monitoring, and operations of GitLab Orbit across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed deployments using Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and cloud services from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or both.
• Automate recurring operational work and build tools that make deployments, upgrades, recovery, capacity management, and service maintenance safer and more efficient.
• Strengthen observability across application, data, orchestration, and infrastructure layers by improving metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, and service-level indicators.
• Investigate production issues, address underlying causes, and write backend code that handles concurrency, partial failures, retries, consistency, idempotency, performance, and multi-tenant isolation.