Principal Software Engineer, Tenant Scale

GitLab

full-time

Posted on: 9/25/2025

Origin: • 🇺🇸 United States • California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois

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💰 $171,400 - $367,200 per year

Lead

Distributed SystemsGoKafkaPostgresRuby

About the role

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 align SaaS evolution with 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

Extensive experience designing, developing, migrating, scaling, and operating large distributed systems in a SaaS context
Hands-on programming experience in Ruby and/or Go; 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 prioritizing 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)