Senior Systems Engineer - GitLab & Artifactory platforms (Hybrid- San Diego, CA or Kirkland, WA)

We are looking for a Senior Systems Engineer for a large, global B2B high-tech company. In this role, you will own operational strategy and technical direction for GitLab and Artifactory platforms. You will lead cloud-native transformations, Kubernetes migrations, and GitOps adoption.

This is a 12-month contract (Extension possible), 40 hours per week, hybrid role, 2-3 days onsite at client s office in San Diego, CA or Kirkland, WA.

This is a W2 employee of Stage 4 Solutions. Health benefits and 401K are offered.

Responsibilities

• Own operational strategy and technical direction for GitLab and Artifactory platforms
• Lead cloud-native transformations, Kubernetes migrations, and GitOps adoption
• Drive architecture for multi-region high-availability deployments and active-active patterns
• Design self-healing systems with automated remediation and chaos engineering practices
• Establish cloud-native best practices, including 12-factor apps, containerization, and observability
• Mentor team members on automation patterns and cloud-native architectures
• Influence organizational standards for platform engineering and developer experience
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted operations, eBPF, and service mesh
• Define and track SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs with a continuous improvement focus

Requirements

• 7+ years of operating and architecting enterprise-scale platforms
• 5+ years of self-managed GitLab experience, including Geo, high availability, and disaster recovery
• 5+ years of Artifactory experience, including Hub/Edge, federation, and enterprise deployments
• 3+ years of deep Kubernetes experience, including operators, CRDs, service mesh, and multi-cluster environments
• 7+ years of expert Linux experience, including kernel, networking, and performance tuning
• PostgreSQL high availability experience, such as Patroni, and advanced networking knowledge, including BGP, anycast, and zero-trust architectures
• Bachelor s degree.

Cloud-Native Expertise

• Deep knowledge of cloud computing, infrastructure, and architecture patterns
• Experience with major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, and their managed services
• Experience with cloud-native tooling, including Kubernetes operators, Helm, ArgoCD, and Flux
• Experience with service mesh technologies, including Istio, and infrastructure-as-code tools, including Terraform
• Experience with cloud-native observability, including Prometheus, and distributed tracing
• Experience with cloud-native security, including OPA, Trivy, and SBOM practices
• Production-grade automation experience with Python, Go, and Bash
• CI/CD platform design experience at scale
• Experience with FedRAMP IL4/IL5

Preferred

• Open-source contributions to Kubernetes, GitLab, or Artifactory projects
• Experience with eBPF observability/security, WebAssembly, or MLOps
• Published technical writing or conference talks
• Developer platform or platform-as-a-service experience
• SRE practices and chaos engineering experience

Please submit your resume to our network at http://www.stage4solutions.com/careers/ (apply to the Senior Systems Engineer - GitLab & Artifactory platforms (Hybrid- San Diego, CA or Kirkland, WA) role).

Please feel free to forward this job post to others you think may be interested.

Stage 4 Solutions is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to providing employees with an inclusive environment that is free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions are based on the job requirements and candidates qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion/belief, national origin, gender identity, age, disability, marital status, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Compensation: $80/hr - $85.60/hr.