About the company
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.
Responsibilities
- Lead a Unified Platform Strategy: Define and execute a cohesive roadmap that aligns Production Engineering (Fleet, Network, Cost, Responder) with Tenant Experience (Observability, Controls, Upgrade Tooling). Ensure these investments connect cleanly to support GitLab’s multi-tenant and self-managed reality.
- Drive Operational Excellence & Reliability: Maintain deep accountability for GitLab’s production outcomes. You will oversee incident management, alert efficacy, and service-level reliability, ensuring that both GitLab.com and our global customer base benefit from a stable, high-performance platform.
- Scale Engineering Leadership: Manage a senior management team, coaching them on performance, hiring, team structure, and execution. You will create the organizational conditions for success—defining clear mandates, removing blockers, and fostering a culture of ownership and accountability.
- Evolve the Platform Architecture: Guide the technical evolution of the platform. This includes optimizing fleet management and cloud utilization, maturing our observability and self-healing frameworks, and delivering a modern upgrade experience that bridges the gap between legacy Omnibus and modern Kubernetes/cloud-native models.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Engineering Directors, Product Leaders, and Reliability/Delivery teams to ensure platform investments align with business priorities (e.g., AI roadmap, cost goals, deployment speed).
- Translate Strategy into Execution: Convert broad organizational goals into actionable roadmaps. You will make tough trade-off decisions between immediate production stability and long-term architectural health, ensuring the team remains focused on outcomes that drive business value.
- Build the Future of GitLab Operations: Champion initiatives that reduce operational toil, improve the developer/operator experience, and standardise platform interfaces across our modular service architecture.
Requirements
- Executive Engineering Leadership: Proven experience leading large, distributed engineering organizations (managing managers) within complex, high-scale platform environments.
- Deep Production Expertise: A track record of owning critical production systems. You understand the realities of running distributed systems at scale, including incident response, traffic management, capacity planning, and cloud infrastructure costs.
- Platform Engineering Acumen: Deep familiarity with large-scale distributed systems, along with various delivery models including containerized and Kubernetes-based platforms, infrastructure-as-code, and the operational challenges of supporting multi-tenant SaaS alongside diverse self-managed (Omnibus/OAK) deployments.
- Strategic Architectural Judgment: Ability to evaluate complex technical trade-offs—such as build vs. buy, cloud-first vs. on-prem constraints, and architectural patterns for modular services—and provide clear, defensible recommendations.