Intermediate Site Reliability Engineer - FinOps

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) – FinOps

FinOps Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at GitLab ensure the reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency of our user-facing services and internal systems. We are a team of pragmatic engineers, blending operational discipline, engineering best practices, and automation to manage complex environments and large-scale infrastructures. Our core mission is to operate GitLab's systems with financial accountability, striving for optimal cost-performance balance.

As an SRE for FinOps:

You will play a critical role in driving the integration of FinOps principles into GitLab’s operational and engineering practices. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Finance, Engineering, and Compliance, to ensure that financial efficiency is embedded in all stages of system design, deployment, and operation.

Build:

• Automate operational tasks related to cost management, including the provisioning of cost-efficient cloud resources and managing configurations to reduce unnecessary spending.

• Develop tools and processes for tracking, reporting, and optimizing cloud infrastructure costs, ensuring all operational tasks are automated for maximum efficiency and scalability.

Plan:

• Partner with the Finance and Engineering teams to identify opportunities to optimize cloud costs while maintaining high levels of service reliability and performance.

• Use data-driven insights and FinOps best practices to evaluate and make trade-offs between infrastructure costs and feature development priorities.

• Drive the adoption of cost-conscious decision-making throughout the development and deployment lifecycle, ensuring that financial considerations are prioritized alongside technical goals.

Partner:

• Act as a subject matter expert (SME) for financial operations (FinOps) across the GitLab Infrastructure team, helping to drive cloud cost optimization strategies.

• Work with internal and external auditors to ensure financial compliance, particularly in relation to cloud infrastructure usage. Support audits and certifications like FedRAMP, SOC2, and ISO by collaborating with the Finance and Compliance teams.

• Provide insight into how changes in GitLab’s systems, infrastructure, and usage patterns affect financial forecasting, reporting, and budgeting.

Collaborate:

• Work closely with engineering and product teams to identify and eliminate architectural bottlenecks that impact cloud efficiency and cost. Offer a large-scale operational perspective to help teams design systems that are both reliable and financially sustainable.

• Collaborate across engineering teams to promote cost-awareness and share best practices for optimizing cloud infrastructure spending, encouraging the integration of FinOps principles in day-to-day decision-making.

You may be a fit for this role if you:

• Have experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) technologies, particularly those used at GitLab (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).

• Are passionate about ensuring that systems are not only scalable and reliable but also financially optimized.

• Have a deep understanding of large-scale systems and their financial impacts, including failure modes and cost-benefit analysis.

• Enjoy collaborating with cross-functional teams (Engineering, Finance, Compliance) to solve complex challenges that affect both operational performance and financial outcomes.

• Have hands-on experience with cloud platforms like AWS or GCP, and are eager to deepen your expertise in cloud cost management and optimization.

Key Projects You Could Work On:

• Develop, evangelize, and monitor the adoption of FinOps best practices across GitLab’s cloud infrastructure.

• Engage with US Public Sector entities and regulatory bodies to ensure GitLab’s services meet Federal compliance standards and are financially optimized for large-scale deployments.

• Partner with Finance to evaluate and forecast costs, making sure that GitLab's cloud footprint is cost-effective and aligned with business objectives.

• Drive cost-efficient changes across various GitLab environments and cloud provider systems (AWS, GCP) while contributing to GitLab’s observability and monitoring stacks (e.g., Prometheus, ELK).

• Work on GitLab’s core projects (e.g., GitLab Rails, GitLab Runners) to enhance both technical and financial aspects of our infrastructure.

• Contribute to GitLab’s automation tools (e.g., Helm Charts, Omnibus GitLab) and infrastructure-as-code initiatives to ensure that cost controls are built into the deployment pipelines.

How GitLab will support you

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being

• All remote, asynchronous work environment

• Flexible Paid Time Off

• Team Member Resource Groups

• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Growth and development budget 

• 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.