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

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Group Tenant Scale (GTS) team, you'll shape how GitLab.com evolves from a single massive multi-tenant instance into a modern, distributed SaaS platform. You'll guide the technical strategy for Cells (self-contained clusters), Organizations (logical groupings of tenants), and OrgMover (seamless migration tooling), solving challenges that few companies face at this scale and ensuring that millions of users experience a fast, resilient, and secure product every day. You'll influence architecture and infrastructure decisions across sharding, tenant isolation, regionality, and migrations, creating patterns that make our platform more reliable, scalable, and flexible as usage grows.

You'll architect and lead complex distributed systems initiatives, from Postgres sharding and multi-tenant isolation to regional distribution, fault tolerance, and end-to-end observability. You'll build and evolve the frameworks and tooling that move GitLab.com from a monolithic deployment model to horizontally scalable Cells and Organizations, and you'll champion practices that enable zero-downtime migrations and safe, incremental rollout of this new architecture. Working hands-on in the codebase and partnering closely with product, infrastructure, and executive leadership, you'll turn long-term SaaS strategy into incremental, customer-visible improvements and help define the next generation of GitLab.com's multi-tenant architecture.

What you'll do
Own the long-term technical roadmap for Group Tenant Scale, driving the Cells, Organizations, and OrgMover initiatives that directly improve GitLab.com reliability, performance, scalability, and regionality.
Lead architecture and design for complex distributed systems challenges such as tenant isolation, Postgres sharding, multi-region replication, observability, fault tolerance, and zero-downtime tenant migrations.
Define and champion architectural and migration standards for Cells, Organizations, and OrgMover, creating patterns and guardrails that help product teams evolve the SaaS platform safely and quickly.
Build and evolve service communication, observability, and migration tooling so Group Tenant Scale and adjacent teams can detect issues early, understand system behavior, and turn incident learnings into automated, repeatable workflows.
Partner with engineering, product, infrastructure, and executive leaders to align the GitLab.com SaaS transformation with business priorities, translating long-term multi-tenant strategy into incremental, customer-visible improvements.
Identify and deliver opportunities to improve reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness across the new platform architecture, including data partitioning strategies, migration paths, and regional deployment patterns.
Mentor and coach senior and staff engineers across Group Tenant Scale and collaborating teams, providing technical leadership, feedback, and guidance that raises the bar for design quality, distributed systems thinking, and inclusive collaboration.
Contribute directly to key code paths and architecture documents for Cells, Organizations, and OrgMover, staying hands-on with Ruby, Go, and related components so you can deep-dive into complex distributed issues and prototype solutions when needed.
What you'll bring
Extensive experience designing, building, migrating, and operating large distributed systems in SaaS environments, ideally including transitions from monolithic to cell- or shard-based architectures.
Deep understanding of tenant isolation, regional distribution, multi-region replication, and high availability, with a focus on customer reliability, data integrity, and disaster recovery.
Background leading the architecture of complex platforms that span application and infrastructure layers, including Postgres sharding or other database partitioning strategies, service-to-service communication, and resilient migration workflows.
Hands-on programming skills in Ruby and/or Go, with the ability to dive into the GitLab application codebase, review critical implementations, and guide design decisions that balance performance, safety, and maintainability.
Familiarity with modern infrastructure practices such as infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, service mesh, and observability tooling, and how to apply them to large, evolving multi-tenant systems.
Ability to debug complex, cross-system issues across database, application, and infrastructure boundaries, and to turn those insights into robust, automated patterns for migrations, failovers, and recovery.
Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams or groups, aligning stakeholders on tradeoffs for SaaS scalability and regionality, and providing practical guidance on how to safely evolve a live, high-traffic platform.
Openness to collaborating with people from diverse technical and non-technical backgrounds, with a focus on clear communication, inclusive decision-making, and mentoring senior and principal engineers through large-scale architectural change.
About the team

Group Tenant Scale (GTS) is a function within the Engineering organization focused on re-architecting GitLab.com into the next-generation multi-tenant SaaS platform. Our mission is to make GitLab.com horizontally scalable, resilient, and flexible so that customers of every size experience high reliability, global reach, and the freedom to grow with GitLab. We build and evolve foundational capabilities like Cells (self-contained clusters), Organizations (logical groupings of tenants), and OrgMover (seamless migration tooling), partnering closely with product, infrastructure, and security teams in an all-remote, asynchronous way. As part of this group, you'll help define and deliver the architecture that powers GitLab’s future SaaS, creating patterns and platforms that other engineering teams can adopt with confidence as we move from a single massive instance to a distributed, globally aware system. For more on how we work, see the Team Handbook Page.

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.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range$157,900—$338,400 USDHow GitLab will support you
- Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
- Flexible Paid Time Off 
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- 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.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.  

Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.

GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.