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The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.
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We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the teams building the core primitives for Workflows and Function Runtime at GitLab. You will own the strategy, architecture, and delivery of scalable, multi-tenant, and cost-efficient distributed systems that become shared infrastructure for many product groups across GitLab.
This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll work directly with senior and principal engineers on design and technical decisions, while also building and scaling a high-performing, values-aligned engineering organization.
What You’ll Do- Own the technical vision and roadmap for GitLab’s core Workflow and Function Runtime primitives, in partnership with Product, Architecture, and other platform teams.
- Lead and grow multiple engineering teams responsible for highly available, horizontally scalable, and secure distributed systems used across GitLab.
- Be hands-on with architecture and code: review designs, dive into incidents, and contribute to critical paths where needed.
- Drive operational excellence for these shared services, including SLOs, on-call, incident response, capacity planning, and resilience across regions and tenants.
- Optimize for cost and efficiency at scale, balancing performance, reliability, and unit economics for long-running and bursty workloads.
- Define and mature platform APIs and abstractions that allow product teams to compose workflows, schedule functions, and integrate with the runtime safely and predictably.
- Create a strong engineering culture focused on results, iteration, ownership, and rigorous technical judgment.
- Collaborate across the company (Product Management, Security, Infrastructure, Data, AI/ML, and other stage groups) to ensure the platform primitives meet the needs of diverse workloads.
- Recruit, develop, and retain senior and staff-level engineers and managers; provide clear expectations, feedback, and growth paths.
- Champion GitLab values (results, transparency, efficiency, collaboration, diversity & inclusion) in how the team plans, executes, and communicates.
- Proven experience leading teams building core platform or infrastructure services (e.g., workflow engines, function runtimes, control planes, high-scale microservices, or similar distributed systems).
- Track record as a hands-on engineering leader: you’ve meaningfully contributed to architecture and design, and you are comfortable reading/writing code to unblock or clarify.
- Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, including topics such as service decomposition, data partitioning, fault tolerance, and backpressure.
- Demonstrated success operating mission-critical services in production (SLOs, on-call, incident management, postmortems, capacity management, chaos/DR testing).
- Experience driving cost efficiency in cloud-native environments (profiling, performance tuning, right-sizing, storage and network optimization, and thoughtful use of managed services).
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), and event-driven/async architectures; experience with function-as-a-service or serverless runtimes is a plus.
- People leadership experience managing managers and senior/staff engineers, with a record of hiring, coaching, and building inclusive, high-trust teams.
- Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization, with excellent written and asynchronous communication skills.
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4–6+ years in engineering leadership (multi-team or org-level scope).
The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.
- Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Team Member Resource Groups
- Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Growth and Development Fund
- Parental Leave
Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.
Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.
Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.
GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.
Skills Required
- Proven experience leading teams building core platform or infrastructure services
- Hands-on engineering leadership with contributions to architecture and design
- Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems
- Experience operating mission-critical services in production
- Experience driving cost efficiency in cloud-native environments
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and modern cloud infrastructure
- People leadership experience managing managers and senior engineers
- Ability to work effectively in a fully remote organization
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
What the Team is Saying
GitLab Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage includes multiple national medical plan options (Cigna EPO/HDHP/PPO and Kaiser in select areas) with separate dental and vision, alongside EAP and dedicated mental‑health support. Company‑paid life/AD&D and disability protections further strengthen the overall safety net.
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Parental & Family Support — Paid parental leave offers 16 weeks at 100% of base pay from day one, with flexibility to use leave in segments and a supported ramp‑back period. Coaching and resources for new parents add structure to planning and return.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Flexible Paid Time Off is complemented by defined sick, caregiving, bereavement, volunteer, and civic leave options. Public holidays are handled flexibly so individuals can observe dates most relevant to them.
GitLab Insights
What We Do
GitLab is the Intelligent Orchestration Platform where software teams and their AI agents stay in flow to amplify their capacity for innovation. Together, they automate repetitive tasks to plan, build, secure, test, deploy and maintain software. With GitLab, software teams spend less time on coordination overhead and more time on the next big idea. What started in 2011 as an open source project to help one team of programmers collaborate is now the intelligent orchestration platform millions of people use to deliver software faster, more efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance. Since the beginning, we've been firm believers in remote work, open source, DevSecOps, and iteration. We get up and log on in the morning to work alongside the GitLab community to deliver new innovations every month that help teams and their AI agents ship great code faster.
Why Work With Us
GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.
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