Gitlab discusses not to hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

Gitlab’s various policies are made public through the website’s documentation, some of which are quite sensitive, such as stopping the recruitment of engineers from some countries for reasons of protecting user data. According to a document from last month, some corporate customers expressed concern about engineers accessing customer data in some countries. The two countries that have raised concerns are China and Russia.

Gitlab explains:

This issue is to track the addition of the process to the support handbook, and whatever recruiting processes need to be update to make certain that:

1. We do not make offers to individuals residing in these countries
2. Current team members are prevented from moving to these countries and remaining in a role that prohibits it.

We do not have a technical way, today, to handle this based on permissions. Doing so would also force us to confront the possibility of creating a “second class of citizens” on certain teams who cannot take part in 100% of their responsibilities, which is a dynamic some of us have experienced at other companies and found highly negative. As such we feel a country block is the most humane solution at this time–especially because it affects zero current employees.

Gitlab is discussing the position of website reliability engineer and support engineer and will not recruit candidates from China and Russia. Currently, there are no engineers from these countries.