Senior Distribution Engineer, Gitlab:Build at GitLab Inc.

An overview of this role

• As a Distribution Engineer, your work within the GitLab Build team will help us manage the build pipelines, research support for new services, platforms, and architectures, as well as maintain existing ones. You will be tasked with ensuring the components that make up GitLab are up-to-date, license compliant, and available for our users’ platforms and architectures. 
• GitLab Build engineering regularly interfaces with broader development teams in supporting newly created features. The GitLab Build team is involved with diverse projects and tasks that include assisting community packaging efforts.

Some interesting links about the team and role:

• Our primary projects
• Our work with the community
• Our Demo videos

What you’ll do  

• Multi-Platform Packages: Build and maintain packages for supported Linux distributions and architectures. Participate in product release activities.
• Container Images: Develop and maintain official GitLab container images
• Build Tooling & Infrastructure: Develop and maintain tools that enable efficient component building
• Integration Services: Ensure development team components integrate seamlessly into GitLab packages
• Security Partnership: Collaborate with Security teams to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities, proactively improve posture and footprint.
• Dependency Management: Maintain up-to-date, secure dependencies across all components
• Documentation & Self-Service: Create guides and provide infrastructure enable and facilitate development teams working independently
• Cloud Marketplace: Manage listings and integrations with major cloud providers
• Installation Experience: Maintain install, update, and upgrade documentation and processes pertaining to GitLab installation and setup
• Quality Assurance: Ensure all installation methods are thoroughly tested before release
• Code License Management: Ensure compliance across all bundled dependencies
• Partner Certifications: Submit components and packages to partners for validations and certifications

What you’ll bring 

• Familiarity with GNU/Linux build toolchains (autotools, make, cmake, gcc, etc.)
• Production experience with building container images and container build tooling
• Experience with Debian and RHEL based systems, and building .deb and .rpm packages
• Experience using Continuous Integration systems (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Action, Jenkins, Travis)
• Advanced Shell Scripting expertise in production environments, including the ability to write and maintain complex scripts (Ruby, Golang, Python, or Rust are a plus)
• Familiarity with building and packaging cloud native applications
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment
• Experience with major cloud providers (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Knowledge of service scaling and rollout strategies. (Desirable)
• Awareness of Observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, etc) is a plus