Principal Infrastructure Security Engineer

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

An overview of this role

As a member of the Infrastructure Security Team within the Product Security Department, you will work with teams across GitLab to ensure that the components that comprise our public cloud infrastructure are built from the beginning with resiliency and set security expectations that our customers rely on to power their DevSecOps goals.

As a Principal Engineer, you will collaborate with teams across GitLab to shape the foundation of our future SaaS Platforms (e.g. GitLab Dedicated, Cells) and Self-Managed experience. You will have a wide sphere of influence and responsibility, maximizing your impact by working through and with others. You’ll drive business outcomes by ensuring that we pragmatically implement security capabilities into the platform that empowers critical software factories globally.

What You’ll Do

• Independently define multi-year security strategy components for cloud infrastructure, including compute, networking, storage, and orchestration platforms, balancing security risk with operational and business requirements
• Design and scope infrastructure security initiatives for the team to execute, breaking down complex problems into actionable work streams with clear success criteria
• Architect and drive implementation of security automation, frameworks, and tooling that become foundational to infrastructure operations (e.g., secrets management, certificate automation, security agents)
• Conduct and lead comprehensive security reviews and threat modeling for complex infrastructure components
• Drive adoption of infrastructure security standards across engineering teams through technical influence, reference implementations, and hands-on enablement
• Quantify and distill architectural tradeoffs into clear decisions for Engineers and Senior Leadership.
• Serve as the go-to expert for Infrastructure Security across the company, providing authoritative technical guidance
• Mentor and develop engineers, elevating the technical leadership and modeling inclusive collaboration.
• Fulfill the Product Security Division Mission of securing GitLab Infrastructure with our own product (“dogfooding”)

What You’ll Bring

• Expert-level knowledge of security for cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes) and related infrastructure and data security topics
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex security concepts into clear, actionable recommendations
• Principal-level technical leadership: ability to set strategy, influence across organizations, and mentor senior engineers.
• Extensive experience designing, developing, and operating large distributed systems in a SaaS context.
• Track record of leading projects with ambiguous requirements that delivered measurable business impact
• Demonstrated history of driving technical strategy that influenced organization-wide security posture
• Understanding of security certifications, frameworks, and standards, like FedRAMP, ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, etc.
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values