Lead Developer Experience & Infrastructure (m/w/d)

Gitlab

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. 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. *Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab. AN OVERVIEW OF THIS ROLE As a member of the Infrastructure Security Team within the Product Security Department, you will work with teams across GitLab to ensure that the components that comprise our public cloud infrastructure are built from the beginning with resiliency and set security expectations that our customers rely on to power their DevSecOps goals. As a Staff Security Engineer, you will serve as a technical lead across the topics the Infrastructure Security team owns, including our SaaS Platforms (e.g. GitLab Dedicated, Cells) and Self-Managed offerings. You will define the technical direction for how the team approaches infrastructure security topics and combine hands-on execution with influence that reaches into partner engineering teams. You’ll drive business outcomes by ensuring that we pragmatically implement security capabilities into the platform that empowers critical software factories globally. What You’ll Do   * Set architectural patterns, reference implementations, and foundational security automation that shape how infrastructure security is implemented across GitLab * Lead infrastructure security initiatives from problem framing through delivery, scoping ambiguous multi-quarter work into executable streams with clear success criteria * Conduct and lead comprehensive security reviews and threat modeling for complex infrastructure components, identifying systemic risks and driving remediation across affected systems * Set the team's approach to AI-assisted security engineering, identifying where AI can meaningfully increase leverage and establishing patterns others can adopt * Serve as an authoritative technical voice for Infrastructure Security across our stakeholders, translating architectural tradeoffs into clear decisions for engineering teams and senior leadership * Partner on technical planning, prioritization, and roadmap development to align technical work with business objectives * Mentor and develop engineers, raising the technical bar and modeling inclusive collaboration * Fulfill the Product Security Division Mission of securing GitLab Infrastructure with our own product ("dogfooding")   What You’ll Bring  * Expert knowledge of security for cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes) and related infrastructure and data security topics * Proficiency in multiple programming languages (Go, Python, Ruby) with a track record of delivering production-quality security tooling * Extensive experience with Infrastructure-as-Code security (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation), policy-as-code, and automated compliance * Hands-on experience applying AI to security workflows, with a point of view on where it creates meaningful leverage * Track record of leading multi-team technical initiatives from ambiguous problem statements to measurable outcomes, setting technical direction that peer teams adopt * Strong written and verbal communication skills, able to explain security tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership * Familiarity with security certifications, frameworks, and standards (FedRAMP, ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI-DSS) * Share our values, and work in accordance with those values 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. HOW GITLAB SUPPORTS FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES * 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.

Gitlab

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. 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. *Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab. An overview of this role Site Reliability Engineers keep GitLab's user-facing services and production systems running reliably at scale. They combine software engineering with operational excellence, applying sound engineering principles, automation, and continuous improvement to build, operate, and evolve our production infrastructure. This is a single application for Site Reliability Engineering opportunities across our Infrastructure Platforms department. Rather than asking you to choose the right team or level upfront, we evaluate your skills holistically and match you to the opportunity that best aligns with your experience and our hiring needs. We hire Site Reliability Engineers from Intermediate through Senior Staff across multiple Infrastructure Platforms teams. We don't expect every candidate to have experience with every technology in our environment. We're looking for engineers with strong technical fundamentals, a growth mindset, and the ability to learn quickly. We'll support you in becoming successful with GitLab's tools, systems, and ways of working. How our SRE hiring works Because this is a single application for SRE roles across Infrastructure Platforms, our process is built to evaluate you once and match you well, rather than interviewing separately for every team. * Recruiter Screen: A conversation about your background, what you're looking for, and the level and teams that fit, so we can point your process in the right direction. * Core Technical: The shared assessment every SRE candidate takes, regardless of eventual team. A low-stress, collaborative discussion covering source code, system architecture, and incident review. * Peer Technical: Team-specific depth, run by SREs from the team you're most likely to join, focused on the problems that team actually works on. * Hiring Manager Interview: A conversation about ownership, judgment, execution, collaboration, and growth, the non-technical signals that make an SRE effective at GitLab. * Skip-Level Interview: A conversation with a senior leader on values alignment, and how you'll work across teams. After your interviews, we consider your performance alongside our current hiring needs to confirm the level and team where you'll do your best work. Interview results are a major factor, and final placement also reflects our active hiring priorities at the time. What level am I? We calibrate your level during the process, but here is roughly what each looks like so you know where you might land. Intermediate * You make meaningful contributions to reliability, automation, and operational efficiency, working independently within a scoped area * You diagnose issues on your own, understand system dependencies, and can explain the tradeoffs you made * You prioritize well, break work into manageable steps, and use automation to reduce toil * You document your work clearly and keep yourself moving without needing check-ins Senior * You drive reliability improvements across multiple projects or services and prioritize them based on real system needs * You lead investigations, anticipate cascading failures, and coordinate incident response * You own delivery end to end, unblock others, and improve the patterns your team works by * You communicate complex ideas clearly, influence how work gets done, and enable coordination across teams Staff * You shape reliability strategy across teams and services and define patterns that others reuse * You introduce prevention strategies, identify systemic weaknesses, and influence incident response practices beyond your immediate area * You design execution and automation approaches that work at organizational scale * You connect reliability work to platform and business needs Senior Staff * You set technical direction for reliability across a sub-department, not just a team * You drive the hardest, most ambiguous systems problems and establish standards and guardrails that multiple teams adopt * You mentor Staff and Senior engineers * You align reliability strategy with long-range platform direction and represent Infrastructure's interests across the wider Engineering organization What you'll do * Keep user-facing services and production systems reliable, scalable, and efficient * Build automation and tooling that reduces toil and replaces manual work with repeatable, infrastructure-as-code-driven workflows * Operate and troubleshoot production systems on Kubernetes, including deployments, rollouts, and scaling * Write and maintain infrastructure as code, and ship changes safely through CI/CD and GitOps * Participate in on-call, triage alerts, follow and improve runbooks, and escalate appropriately * Contribute to the observability stack, using metrics, logs, and SLOs to detect symptoms early rather than just outages * Take part in incident response and post-incident reviews, turning learnings into changes in automation and process * Document runbooks, architecture decisions, and reviews so your findings become repeatable practices What you'll bring * Experience keeping production systems reliable, combining an operations mindset with real software engineering practice * Experience building net-new infrastructure tooling and automation, not just configuring existing tools. For example, Terraform modules, Kubernetes operators or controllers, or production automation and services written from scratch * The ability to read, debug, and reason about code. Most of our teams work in Go; some work in Ruby. You can discuss a piece of code's behavior, performance, and failure modes * Experience with infrastructure as code, and with Kubernetes and its ecosystem, at a depth appropriate to your level * Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (GCP or AWS) * Familiarity with observability practices, including metrics, logging, alerting, and SLOs or SLIs, and using data to inform operational decisions * Comfort participating in on-call and incident response, with a structured approach to troubleshooting under pressure * Strong written communication and the ability to operate as a manager-of-one in an async, distributed environment * A track record of using automation, and increasingly AI, to reduce toil and improve how you and your team work * Alignment with GitLab's values and a commitment to working in accordance with them About the team Infrastructure Platforms is responsible for the availability, reliability, performance, and scalability of GitLab's user-facing services, most notably GitLab.com. The department spans sub-departments including Production Engineering and Dedicated, and the teams within them own everything from the production fleet and networking platform to observability, incident response, and our single-tenant Dedicated offering. We are a globally distributed, all-remote group that works asynchronously, favors automation over toil, and closes the loop with monitoring and metrics to drive accountability. For more on how we work, see the Infrastructure Handbook Page.   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. United States Salary Range $126,400—$314,400 USD HOW GITLAB SUPPORTS FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES * 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.

Gitlab

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. 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. *Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab. An overview of this role As the Senior Director of Production and Tenant Platform Engineering, you will lead the foundational engineering teams responsible for the reliability, scalability, and lifecycle of the GitLab platform. This role brings together two critical domains: the "Tenant Experience" (the operator and customer facing platform surfaces) and the "Production Engineering" pillars (the underlying infrastructure that powers GitLab.com and our self-managed offerings). You will lead a high-performing organization of managers and engineers who own the entire stack, from network infrastructure, fleet management, and cloud cost efficiency to observability, tenant controls, and the upgrade lifecycle. Your mission is to evolve GitLab’s platform architecture to support massive scale across SaaS, Dedicated, and self-managed environments, ensuring that whether a customer runs in the cloud or on-prem, they experience a platform that is reliable, performant, and easy to operate. This is a high-impact leadership role. You’ll define the strategy for how GitLab remains resilient, manage critical production incidents, drive cloud efficiency, and build the abstractions that allow modular services (like AI Gateway, ClickHouse, and OpenBao) to ship and scale with confidence. You will succeed by cultivating a culture of operational excellence, simplifying complex technical architectures, and ensuring your organization operates with clarity and alignment in a high-growth environment. What you'll do * 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. What you'll bring * 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 direction. * Change Management: Experience leading teams through periods of significant growth, organizational change, or technical pivot (e.g., modernizing a monolith or scaling infrastructure for new product lines). * Commitment to GitLab Values: Strong alignment with our values of ownership, speed with quality, and customer outcomes. * Operational Focus: A proven ability to raise the bar on production quality. You have successfully led initiatives that measurably improved system reliability, reduced toil, or optimized infrastructure efficiency. About the team The Production and Tenant Platform team sits at the core of GitLab’s Infrastructure Platforms organization. We own the "how" of GitLab—how it runs, how it scales, and how it is managed by operators and customers alike. Our scope is broad: we manage the network edge, the underlying cloud compute fleet, and the cost efficiency of our services; we provide the observability signals that detect issues; we define the tenant controls (rate limits, feature flags) that protect our system; and we build the upgrade tools that make GitLab’s release cycle sustainable. We work across all GitLab environments (GitLab.com, Dedicated, and self-managed) to deliver a unified, coherent platform. We are a team of problem-solvers who value transparency and autonomy, and we partner closely with Delivery, Dedicated, and Product teams to ensure the infrastructure isn't just reliable, but that it is the primary engine of GitLab's growth and customer success. 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. United States Salary Range $168,000—$285,600 USD HOW GITLAB SUPPORTS FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES * 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.