How the Engineering Career Path Works at GitLab
At GitLab, geography doesn’t determine an employee’s ability to grow.
Just ask Huzaifa Iftikhar, a staff back-end engineer based in India who works on GitLab’s SSCS:Compliance team. He has been promoted twice since joining the company in 2021, making the transition from back-end engineer to senior back-end engineer before stepping into his current role.
Prior to joining GitLab, Iftikhar worked on mobile test automation infrastructure at a SaaS company. This experience gave him a solid foundation in debugging production systems and shipping customer-facing features, but didn’t come anywhere near the scope of work he does at GitLab.
“Here, I’m designing systems that need to work across multiple teams and scale to enterprise levels, authoring design documents with principal engineers, and thinking about how compliance features interact with the broader platform,” Iftikhar said. “The jump from individual feature work to shaping the technical direction of an entire domain has been the most rewarding part of my career so far.”
What does GitLab do?
GitLab’s single AI-powered DevSecOps platform lets teams deliver software faster with integrated tools across the software development lifecycle.
What It Takes to Get Promoted as an Engineer at GitLab
The key to continuous growth at GitLab means taking initiative and paving the way for others to drive innovation.
After thriving in his role as a back-end engineer, Iftikhar built critical skills as a senior back-end engineer, including deep ownership of the company’s codebase, becoming a force multiplier for the team, and demonstrating his ability to lead technically on his own. During this time, he was motivated to contribute beyond his own feature work, taking ownership of things like monitoring the error budget, triaging Sentry errors and creating follow-up issues.
“You have to take ownership, communicate proactively, and pull others in,” he said. “There’s no one standing over your shoulder, but there’s also no one who’s going to do the coordination work for you.”
One moment in particular crystallized why Iftikhar was worthy of a promotion: leading the Automated Deletion of Inactive Projects initiative end to end.
“It was a cross-stage effort aimed at reducing over $1 million in operational costs, and I was driving the technical implementation, architectural decisions and stakeholder communication with minimal guidance,” he said.
After the company pivoted to a different approach, Iftikhar adapted the feature for self-managed instances, an experience that taught him that senior-level work is about navigating ambiguity and delivering value when plans change.
Once he became a staff back-end engineer, he took on the company’s compliance framework evolution, taking a basic labeling system and transforming it into a platform that later saw 126 percent growth in adoption. It required Iftikhar to coordinate across application security while authoring design documents and ensuring the database design could handle enterprise scale, all of which felt like a “qualitative shift” in the impact he was making on the business.
In addition to mentoring other engineers, he has driven cross-group initiatives like the ClickHouse audit event migration, which he said has been a deep dive into columnar databases and how they handle high-volume event data differently from PostgreSQL.
Iftikhar has also worked on systems processing more than 20 million daily audit events and more than 2 million daily compliance checks, which demands careful attention to query performance, scalability analysis and database design. Besides that, he helped develop the company’s AI-powered features and led a strategic partnership with Snowflake engineers to build a GitLab data connector app, which directly supported company objectives.
“For the staff back-end engineer role, the bar shifted from ‘Can you deliver independently at a high level?’ to ‘Are you shaping technical direction and multiplying the output of others?’” Iftikhar said.
How GitLab’s Culture of Transparency Supports Promotions in a Remote Workplace
One of GitLab’s core values is “transparency” — and according to Iftikhar, it makes all the difference when it comes to leveling the playing field for remote employees.
“In traditional companies, promotions often depend on who happens to be in the room when decisions are made,” he said. “At GitLab, because everything is documented and public, your work creates its own paper trail.”
“At GitLab, because everything is documented and public, your work creates its own paper trail.”
To that end, GitLab subscribes to what they call a “handbook-first” culture. What this means is that rather than documents or decisions living on Slack or in people’s heads, GitLab employees put everything into a public handbook first and work from there.
How GitLab Makes Work More Visible in a Global Remote Workplace
“GitLab’s culture of transparency does a lot of the heavy lifting here, but you still have to be intentional. Here are a few things that worked for me:
- Writing things down: I took a handbook-first approach. Every proposal, every architectural decision and every process improvement was documented. When your work is written down and public, it becomes visible by default.
- Proactive stakeholder communication: On projects like Delayed Project Deletion and the Snowflake partnership, I made sure stakeholders were never surprised, relying on weekly updates, clear status tracking and transparent communication about blockers.
- Code review as visibility: Reviewing merge requests meant I was interacting with engineers across the organization regularly. That naturally builds visibility and trust.
- Volunteering for cross-cutting work: Becoming a maintainer, a database reviewer and a technical interviewer put me in rooms I wouldn’t have been in otherwise.”
According to Iftikhar, GitLab’s handbook-first culture encourages employees to learn how to communicate more effectively, which sets them up for further growth.
“When you have to write things down clearly enough for an async, global audience to understand, you naturally develop the skills — clear technical writing, structured proposals and proactive communication — that are exactly what’s expected at senior and staff levels,” Iftikhar said.
Despite the focus on successful asynchronous work, GitLab tries to ensure that when there are face-to-face moments, everyone can attend.
When companywide kickoffs or engineering all-hands meetings occur, for example, GitLab makes it easy for Iftikhar and his peers to attend each one by offering multiple time slots, including ones specifically for the Asia-Pacific region. GitLab also offers team member resource groups like Global Voices, which ensure everyone feels like they belong, regardless of where they live in the world.
At the time when Iftikhar was hired, GitLab employed Indian team members through a Professional Employer Organization, a third-party firm that provides comprehensive HR services. But now, GitLab has an officially established legal entity in India, which Iftikhar described as a “genuine investment in the region.”
“The India team has also grown significantly since I started, which is great to see,” he said.
“Initially, understanding timezone overlaps was a bit challenging, but as you settle into the async culture, you realize that thorough written communication eliminates the need for a lot of real-time overlap."
How Manager Support, Code Review and Mentoring Help Engineers Advance at GitLab
Iftikhar has had three different managers during his time at GitLab, and all of them have played a key role in his professional development.
He said that his managers have consistently provided constructive feedback and helped him take on rewarding opportunities. For instance, when Iftikhar was preparing to step into his staff back-end engineer role, his manager worked closely with him on his promotion plan, helping him understand timelines, what the business justification needed to look like and how to align his work with what the company needed at that level.
His teammates have also been equally impactful, offering their expertise during critical moments.
“The code review culture at GitLab is something special,” Iftikhar said. “People don’t just say, ‘This doesn’t look right,’ They explain why and suggest what could be improved.”
What GitLab Engineers Are Building for AI Governance and Compliance
In the new AI-first era, there’s one area that’s often overlooked: governance. And according to Iftikhar, that’s where GitLab can directly support its clients.
“Our team is currently working on filling that gap by building capabilities to audit actions taken by AI agents and providing a comprehensive analytical dashboard for AI governance,” Iftikhar said.
Not only is this work critically important for customers navigating this new landscape right now, but Iftikhar said it’s also the kind of high-stakes, technically complex challenge that highly motivated engineers will enjoy.
“We've tackled similar scale challenges before on the compliance team, and I'm excited to see where this next chapter takes us,” Iftikhar said.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is GitLab’s handbook-first culture?
GitLab’s handbook-first culture means employees put decisions, proposals, processes and documentation into a public handbook first instead of letting information live in Slack or in people’s heads. That makes work more visible, creates a clear record of contributions and helps teams collaborate across a global remote company.
How does async work support career growth at GitLab?
Async work supports career growth by pushing engineers to communicate clearly in writing, document decisions and proactively keep stakeholders informed. According to Iftikhar, those habits build the exact skills needed for more senior roles, while GitLab’s transparent documentation also helps remote employees make their impact visible.
What kind of work do GitLab engineers do?
GitLab engineers work on large-scale, customer-facing and platform-level problems across the DevSecOps lifecycle. In Iftikhar’s case, that has included designing enterprise-scale systems, authoring design documents, building compliance features, improving audit event infrastructure, contributing to AI-powered features and developing tools for AI governance and analytics.
