Distribution Engineer

An overview of this role

As a Senior Distribution Engineer on the GitLab Build team, you'll manage build pipelines, evaluate support needs for new services, platforms, and architectures, and maintain existing ones. You'll keep the components that make up GitLab up to date and license-compliant, and make them available for users' platforms and architectures.

You'll work with development teams as they support new features and contribute to projects that include community packaging efforts.

What you’ll do

• Build and maintain packages for supported Linux distributions and architectures, including release activities.
• Develop and maintain official GitLab container images and tooling that enables efficient component building.
• Enable development teams to integrate their components into GitLab packages by providing guides and infrastructure that support self-service.
• Collaborate with security teams to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities and maintain secure, up-to-date dependencies.
• Manage cloud marketplace listings and integrations with major cloud providers.
• Maintain and test installation, update, and upgrade documentation and processes before release.
• Ensure license compliance across bundled dependencies.
• Submit components and packages to partners for validation and certification.

What you’ll bring

• Have used Linux build toolchains such as autotools, make, CMake, and Nix.
• Have built container images and used container build tooling in production.
• Have worked with Debian- and Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based systems to build .deb and .rpm packages and package cloud native applications.
• Have used continuous integration systems, including GitLab's continuous integration feature, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Travis CI.
• Have written and maintained complex shell scripts in production environments.
• Have communicated in written and spoken English in a remote, largely asynchronous work environment.
• Have worked with major cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure.
• Additional experience with Ruby, Go, Python, or Rust, or observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, would be helpful.

About the team

We produce system packages, container images, related components such as marketplace listings, and the tooling that creates and maintains them. We bridge development teams and end users by providing tooling and expertise that enable efficient component building and deliver simple, secure, dependable installation experiences. We also review a large number of merge requests from outside our team, including dependency and security updates for bundled components such as PostgreSQL, Consul, and Patroni.