What is a DevOps Engineer?

At GitLab, a DevOps Engineer (often aligned with Site Reliability Engineering or Infrastructure teams) plays a pivotal role in maintaining the stability, scalability, and performance of the platform that millions of developers rely on daily. Unlike typical DevOps roles where you might manage tooling for a specific product, here you are often "dogfooding"—using GitLab to build and deploy GitLab. You are the architect of the efficiency that defines the company’s product offering.

This role requires a deep understanding of how code moves from development to production in a massive, distributed environment. You will work on complex challenges involving Kubernetes orchestration, CI/CD pipeline optimization, and cloud infrastructure automation (primarily GCP). Your work directly impacts the user experience by ensuring high availability and rapid incident response.

You are not just a maintainer; you are a strategic partner to the engineering organization. You will influence how the company ships software, championing the "Infrastructure as Code" philosophy and ensuring that the GitLab handbook's principles of transparency and iteration are reflected in the technical stack.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparation for GitLab is unique because the company operates with a high degree of transparency. Your preparation should focus not just on technical competence, but on your ability to function in an all-remote, asynchronous environment.

Technical Proficiency You must demonstrate hands-on expertise with the core stack. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to debug complex systems, specifically focusing on Linux internals, Kubernetes, and cloud networking. You should be comfortable discussing how to scale systems and automate toil using tools like Terraform and Ansible.

The "Manager of One" Mindset GitLab evaluates your ability to work autonomously. Because the company is 100% remote and asynchronous, interviewers look for candidates who can define their own daily priorities, document their work extensively, and communicate clearly without needing constant synchronous oversight.

Values Alignment (The Handbook) Culture fit is assessed rigorously against the GitLab Values (Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Iteration, and Transparency—CREDIT). You will be evaluated on how you embody these values in your past work. For example, do you default to public documentation over private messages? Do you iterate on small changes rather than waiting for perfection?

Interview Process Overview

The interview process at GitLab is renowned for being thorough, structured, and documentation-heavy. Based on candidate data, the process can range from 3 to 8 weeks, depending on the urgency of the role and scheduling logistics. The company prides itself on a "human" approach, often framing interviews as peer-to-peer conversations rather than interrogations, though candidates note that the technical rigor remains high.

You will typically start with a screening call that covers your background and alignment with the company's remote culture. Following this, you will enter a series of rounds that separate behavioral competencies from technical skills. A distinctive feature of GitLab’s process is the potential for a "Take Home Merge Request (MR)" or a practical simulation, where you are asked to review code or solve a Kubernetes infrastructure problem in a live setting.

The final stages involve deep dives with hiring managers and leadership. These sessions focus heavily on "situational" questions—asking you to walk through past incidents or architectural decisions. Throughout the process, expect interviewers to refer to the GitLab Handbook; familiarity with its contents is often a differentiator between a "hire" and a "no hire."

The timeline above illustrates the typical flow. Note that the Technical Assessment can vary; some candidates receive a take-home assignment to simulate an asynchronous workflow, while others face a live troubleshooting session. Be prepared for either format.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Your interviews will dissect your technical capabilities and your problem-solving methodology. Based on recent interview experiences, you should prepare for the following key areas:

Kubernetes and Container Orchestration

This is a critical evaluation area. You will likely face a scenario where you must troubleshoot a broken cluster or architect a solution for a scaling issue. Interviewers want to see that you understand the underlying components of Kubernetes, not just how to use kubectl.

Be ready to go over:

• Pod Lifecycle & Scheduling – Understanding why pods fail to start, resource limits/requests, and affinity rules.
• Networking – Service discovery, Ingress controllers, and debugging CNI issues.
• StatefulSets vs. Deployments – When to use which, and how to manage persistent storage.
• Advanced concepts – Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), Helm chart management, and sidecar patterns.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "A deployment in the cluster is crashing in a loop. Walk me through how you debug it."
• "How do you handle secrets management within a Kubernetes environment?"
• "We are seeing high latency in a specific microservice. How do you isolate the issue using standard Linux and K8s tools?"

CI/CD and Release Engineering

Since GitLab is a CI/CD tool, you are expected to be an expert in this domain. You will be evaluated on your ability to design efficient, secure, and reliable pipelines.

Be ready to go over:

• Pipeline Architecture – Stages, jobs, artifacts, and caching strategies to speed up builds.
• GitLab CI/CD specific syntax – .gitlab-ci.yml configuration, runners, and executors.
• Deployment Strategies – Blue/Green, Canary deployments, and feature flags.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How would you optimize a pipeline that is taking 45 minutes to run?"
• "Describe a scenario where a bad deploy broke production. How did you roll back, and how did you prevent recurrence?"

Scripting and Automation

While you don't need to be a software engineer, you must be proficient in code. Go and Ruby are the primary languages at GitLab, though Python is often acceptable for general DevOps tasks.

Be ready to go over:

• Automation Scripts – Writing scripts to automate operational tasks (e.g., database backups, log rotation).
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Terraform state management, modules, and refactoring legacy infrastructure.
• Code Review – You may be asked to review a Merge Request (MR) and point out security flaws or logic errors.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a script to parse a log file and alert if error rates exceed a certain threshold."
• "Review this Terraform plan. What are the potential risks of applying it to production?"

The word cloud above highlights the frequency of topics reported by candidates. Note the prominence of Kubernetes, Culture, and Troubleshooting. This indicates that while coding is required, the ability to debug live systems and fit into the company culture carries equal or greater weight.

Key Responsibilities

As a DevOps Engineer at GitLab, your day-to-day work revolves around ensuring the reliability of the platform. You will be responsible for infrastructure provisioning and management, primarily using Terraform. A significant portion of your time will be spent on incident management—responding to alerts, mitigating outages, and conducting blameless root cause analyses (RCAs) to prevent future issues.

You will collaborate closely with development teams to improve the developer experience. This involves maintaining and optimizing shared CI/CD runners, improving build times, and ensuring that the development environment closely mirrors production. Because GitLab is asynchronous, you will also spend time writing high-quality documentation, creating issues, and communicating via Merge Requests rather than meetings.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for this role, you need a blend of deep systems knowledge and a modern DevOps mindset.

• Must-have skills

  • Linux Mastery: Deep understanding of the kernel, networking, and system calls.
  • Containerization: Production experience with Docker and Kubernetes (GKE preferred).
  • Cloud Infrastructure: Solid experience with GCP (preferred) or AWS.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Proficiency with Terraform.
  • Version Control: Advanced knowledge of Git flows.

• Nice-to-have skills

  • Language Proficiency: Experience with Ruby on Rails or Go is a massive differentiator, as GitLab is built on these technologies.
  • Database Management: Experience managing PostgreSQL at scale.
  • Remote Experience: Prior history of working in a fully remote, distributed team.

Common Interview Questions

The following questions are drawn from candidate data and are representative of what you will face. They are designed to test your technical depth and your alignment with GitLab's specific way of working.

Technical & Troubleshooting

These questions often arise during the technical screen or the live exercise.

• "How do you troubleshoot a high-load issue on a Linux server without installing new tools?"
• "Explain the boot process of a Linux system from power-on to user login."
• "Design a highly available architecture for a stateful application on Kubernetes."
• "What happens when you type google.com into a browser? Go as deep as possible into the networking stack."
• "How would you migrate a legacy application to a containerized environment with zero downtime?"

Behavioral & Values

GitLab takes these questions as seriously as technical ones.

• "Tell me about a time you made a mistake in production. How did you handle the communication around it?"
• "GitLab values 'boring solutions.' Give me an example of a boring solution you implemented."
• "How do you handle a situation where you disagree with a decision made by leadership?"
• "Describe how you manage your time in an asynchronous work environment."

These questions are based on real interview experiences from candidates who interviewed at this company. You can practice answering them interactively on Dataford to better prepare for your interview.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the technical assessment? The technical assessment is rated as "Medium" to "Hard." It is less about solving LeetCode algorithms and more about practical systems engineering. Whether it is a take-home MR or a live debugging session, the focus is on your thought process and familiarity with the tools.

Q: Do I need to know Ruby or Go specifically? While recruiters may say it is "fine" if you don't know them well, candidate experiences suggest that a lack of familiarity with Ruby or Go can be a disadvantage during technical deep dives. Reviewing the basics of these languages is highly recommended.

Q: What is the 'Handbook' and why does everyone mention it? The GitLab Handbook is the central repository for how the company is run. It is public and massive. Interviewers expect you to have read relevant sections (e.g., Engineering workflow, Values). Referencing the Handbook during your interview demonstrates that you have done your homework.

Q: Is the interview really just a "conversation"? Yes and no. Interviewers aim for a conversational tone to lower stress, but they are assessing you constantly. Some candidates have reported feeling that this "conversational" framing can be confusing during high-pressure troubleshooting exercises. Treat it as a formal assessment, even if the tone is casual.

Other General Tips

Read the Handbook This cannot be overstated. Read the "Values" page and the "Engineering" section of the public handbook. It provides the cheat sheet for how to answer behavioral questions.

Embrace "Boring Solutions" GitLab explicitly values "boring solutions"—the simplest, most stable path to solving a problem. Avoid over-engineering your answers. If a simple bash script solves the problem, propose that before suggesting a complex microservice architecture.

Prepare for Asynchronous Communication You may be asked to communicate via written text or a Merge Request during the process. Ensure your writing is clear, concise, and professional.

Summary & Next Steps

The DevOps Engineer role at GitLab is a career-defining opportunity to work at the forefront of the DevOps movement. You will be challenged to build resilient systems at a massive scale while working in one of the world's most mature all-remote cultures. The work you do here will empower developers globally to build better software, faster.

To succeed, focus your preparation on Kubernetes internals, CI/CD architecture, and the GitLab Values. Review the public handbook, brush up on your Ruby/Go basics, and enter the process ready to demonstrate not just what you know, but how you collaborate and iterate.

The salary data above represents the typical range for this position. GitLab uses a transparent compensation calculator based on location and level, so expect the offer to be strictly tied to these factors rather than negotiation leverage. Prepare well, stay calm during the technical rounds, and good luck!