Position: GitLab Engineer

Location: Sydney

Duration: 6months

Job Description:

We are looking for a highly skilled DevOps Architect/Engineer with 7-8 Years hands-on experience in deploying and managing GitLab High Availability (HA) and Geo DR solutions in a VM-based, fully on-premises environment. This role requires strong expertise in GitLab’s internal components such as Gitaly, Praefect, PostgreSQL (HA via Patroni), MinIO, and CI/CD runner architecture, along with Terraform for automated infrastructure provisioning.

The ideal candidate should have a strong understanding of network-level integrations such as load balancers, VIPs, firewall rules, and inter-site routing, and will be responsible for setting up Site A (primary) and Site B (Geo backup) with full HA and failover capabilities.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and deploy GitLab using Omnibus packages on VMs with full HA configuration.
• Set up and maintain GitLab Geo replication between Site A (primary) and Site B (backup).
• Configure PostgreSQL HA clusters using Patroni, etcd, PgBouncer, and HAProxy
• Implement and manage Gitaly Clusters with Praefect for repository sharding and HA
• Set up MinIO as an on-prem object storage backend with bucket-level replication
• Configure and isolate Redis as non-replicated, cold standby at Geo secondary site
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration management using Terraform.
• Integrate GitLab with internal DNS, firewall, and networking services for HA & DR readiness.
• Configure and manage GitLab Runners with appropriate executor strategies using k8.
• Develop and execute backup, restore, and failover testing procedures.
• Create detailed architecture documentation and standard operating procedures (SOPs)

Must-Have Skills:

• Hands-on experience deploying GitLab Omnibus in production.
• In-depth knowledge of GitLab components: Gitaly, Praefect, PostgreSQL, Redis, Registry
• Experience with PostgreSQL HA using Patroni, etcd, PgBouncer, HAProxy.
• Expertise in provisioning infrastructure using Terraform.
• Strong understanding of VM-based architectures (e.g., VMware, KVM, or Hyper-V).
• Object storage integration using MinIO or S3-compatible services.
• GitLab Geo setup and synchronization troubleshooting.
• Network-level expertise: firewalls, VIPs, load balancing, inter-site routing.
• CI/CD configuration, runners, token management, and access control.

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with Ansible or other configuration management tools
• Monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana
• Understanding of DNS-based failover vs. HAProxy-based
• Experience with air-gapped or security-hardened environments