The "Ops" section actually consists of product development teams for features in GitLab itself (the Configure/Monitor "stages"), while the SREs are in the "Infrastructure" department. See https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/#engineering-d.... But yes, we don't seem to be hiring SREs at the moment, but I assume we'll add more openings in the beginning of next year.
Regarding DBAs, that job you posted is more of a normal Backend Engineer role with a database specialty. We also have dedicated Database Engineer roles:
I didn't find some of those jobs, so thanks for linking them.
As a side note I just went through those job descriptions and I -really- like the layout.
On topic: Unfortunately they really do prove my point. There is a very strong focus on "strong" programming skills which is rather undefined. It's literally mentioned in every single role description.
The overwhelming majority of staff that knows how to run software reliably ironically are not software engineers, although there certainly are some software engineers who also possess this skill.
The people I'm speaking about typically understand concepts and solutions (like PAXOS, filesystems or public cloud) more than they understand software development methodology or software product structure.
I guess you have a global reach and can be quite picky about who you hire, maybe you /do/ exclusively hire architecture and systems focused programmers, or maybe "strong" programming skills are a different definition to mine.
That's certainly a valid concern! From my perspective, the programming skills in these job descriptions are one requirement among many others, and I'm not sure how much weight it really has in the hiring process for these roles, especially if your other skills are a good enough match.
We do have this note on all job pages, which maybe should be more prominent:
> Avoid the confidence gap; you do not have to match all the listed requirements exactly to apply.
Some amount of general programming experience is definitely required though, since SREs and DBEs frequently have to dig into our codebase and things like Ansible runbooks. And especially regarding SQL, a lot of it is heavily abstracted not only through the Rails ORM but also our own code.
Found some other jobs that focus less on programming, though we don't have current openings for most of these either:
Why is significant Rails experience a requirement for a database engineer position? That will quite drastically limit your options. Yes, it is a useful skill but hardly necessary to do this job. I know a lot of really good database consultants and they can usually identify and fix bad queries in virtually any framework or ORM. The skills are really transferable.
I didn't find some of those jobs, so thanks for linking them.
As a side note I just went through those job descriptions and I -really- like the layout.
On topic: Unfortunately they really do prove my point. There is a very strong focus on "strong" programming skills which is rather undefined. It's literally mentioned in every single role description.
The overwhelming majority of staff that knows how to run software reliably ironically are not software engineers, although there certainly are some software engineers who also possess this skill.
The people I'm speaking about typically understand concepts and solutions (like PAXOS, filesystems or public cloud) more than they understand software development methodology or software product structure.
I guess you have a global reach and can be quite picky about who you hire, maybe you /do/ exclusively hire architecture and systems focused programmers, or maybe "strong" programming skills are a different definition to mine.