Senior Backend Engineer, Gitlab Delivery; Runway

An overview of this role

As a Senior Engineer on the Runway team, you'll lead the design, evolution, and operation of the Kubernetes-based platform and developer tooling that powers GitLab's engineering organization. You'll drive strategic infrastructure initiatives across platform architecture, automation, and developer experience. That includes operating production Kubernetes clusters across cloud environments, scaling our ArgoCD-based GitOps workflows, and setting infrastructure-as-code practices and standards across teams. You'll mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and drive platform improvements that enhance reliability, observability, and security controls like RBAC and secrets management. Your work will establish clear patterns that make it easier for application teams to adopt modern practices and ship with confidence.

Some examples of our projects:

• Evolve ArgoCD GitOps standards across environments (Application Sets, sync policies, and deployment guardrails)
• Build reusable Terraform modules and practices for safe, repeatable cloud infrastructure provisioning and drift detection

What you'll do

• Lead the operation and evolution of production-grade Kubernetes clusters across cloud environments, making architectural decisions on upgrades, scaling, disaster recovery, and reliability improvements that impact the entire organization.
• Define and drive GitOps strategy and standards across the organization, owning ArgoCD-based workflows by architecting Application Sets, sync policies, and deployment standards, and mentoring teams on GitOps best practices.
• Architect and establish Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code standards across teams, building reusable modules and practices that enable safe, scalable cloud infrastructure provisioning while establishing clear patterns for state management and drift detection.
• Lead platform observability strategy and incident response processes, set standards for monitoring and post-incident reviews, and drive organization-wide improvements to availability, performance, and resilience.
• Partner with and mentor application teams to onboard services onto the platform, establishing patterns for documentation, runbooks, and self-service tooling that scale across the organization and improve developer productivity.
• Design and establish security control standards such as role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, and secrets management (for example, Vault, Sealed Secrets, or External Secrets Operator) that meet compliance requirements and scale across the organization.
• Drive integration of platform capabilities with continuous integration pipelines (for example, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Tekton) to establish end-to-end delivery workflows that set standards across the organization.

What you'll bring

• Experience operating and evolving production Kubernetes clusters (upgrades, scaling, disaster recovery, reliability) across one or more cloud environments (for example, Amazon EKS, Google GKE, or Azure AKS).
• Experience designing and running GitOps-based continuous delivery workflows with ArgoCD, Flux, or similar tools; able to establish and maintain deployment standards across environments.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent), including reusable modules, state management, and drift detection practices for safe infrastructure provisioning.
• Ability to write and maintain automation using a scripting language (for example, Python, Bash, or Go) and guide others on best practices.
• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals (DNS, load balancing, ingress) and related platform patterns (for example, service mesh) to design reliable network architectures.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including mentoring, writing clear system documentation, and establishing runbooks and best practices across teams.

About the team

The Runway team builds and operates the Kubernetes-based platform and developer tooling that GitLab engineers use to ship changes safely and reliably. We own core platform capabilities like production cluster lifecycle management, GitOps-based delivery workflows (ArgoCD), infrastructure as code foundations (Terraform modules and standards), and the reliability and observability practices that keep the platform healthy. We collaborate asynchronously with application and security partners to onboard services, improve self-service workflows, and strengthen controls like RBAC, network policies, and secrets management. The team's focus is reducing friction for developers while improving consistency, security, and operational confidence as the platform scales. For more on how this team works, see the Team Handbook Page.