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 Director of Engineering, Security Factory, you will lead the engineering organization responsible for GitLab’s customer-facing security capabilities across our AI-powered DevSecOps platform. You’ll help shape how customers detect, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities across modern software workflows by guiding teams that build proprietary scanners, AI-driven detection engines, agentic remediation flows, and supporting security foundations. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, Sec section, you’ll set the engineering vision and roadmap for a distributed group of nine teams, including engineering managers, and create the conditions for strong delivery, sound technical direction, and healthy team growth. Some examples of our projects: * Advanced proprietary scanners for Static Application Security Testing, Software Composition Analysis, Secret Detection, and related AI and machine learning detection engines * Agentic security flows for autofix and guided remediation, plus research that strengthens AI security, threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and security foundations WHAT YOU’LL DO * Set the engineering vision and multi-quarter roadmap across teams working on proprietary scanners, AI-driven security workflows, research functions, vulnerability management, and security foundations. * Lead a distributed engineering organization of managers and individual contributors, with a focus on team performance, engagement, and career development. * Drive architectural decisions for AI and machine learning detection engines, agentic remediation flows, and scalable scanning infrastructure. * Partner with product management to define priorities, shape requirements, and deliver security capabilities for customers in regulated and security-conscious environments. * Own the engineering delivery of GitLab’s proprietary application security scanners, agentic remediation workflows, and AI Security Research efforts. * Represent the Security Factory stage in cross-functional planning, executive reviews, security disclosures, and customer conversations. * Establish engineering standards for delivery, observability, incident response, scanner quality, and code quality. * Contribute to GitLab’s transparent, async-first way of working through issues, merge requests, and the GitLab handbook. WHAT YOU’LL BRING * Experience leading engineering organizations with multiple teams and managers in a distributed environment. * Strong understanding of application security fundamentals, including Static Application Security Testing, Software Composition Analysis, secret detection, vulnerability management workflows, and software supply chain security. * Experience building detection, analysis, or scanning systems in a software as a service or DevSecOps environment, including trade-offs across precision, recall, latency, and scale. * Direct experience shipping a customer-facing AI or machine learning product feature tied to detection or remediation quality outcomes. * Ability to partner closely with product management on roadmap planning, prioritization, and requirements in a product-led context. * Strong written communication skills and comfort leading through clear documentation in a remote, async-first organization. * Collaborative leadership style that supports teams, gives direct feedback, and aligns with GitLab’s values. * Familiarity with agentic AI systems, AI agent orchestration, threat intelligence research, or open source security tooling is useful, and we welcome candidates with adjacent or transferable experience. ABOUT THE TEAM The Security Factory group builds the customer-facing security capabilities of GitLab’s AI-powered DevSecOps platform. The organization includes nine teams working across proprietary scanners, AI-driven detection, agentic remediation, research, vulnerability management, and security foundations, and it collaborates asynchronously across regions with product management and other cross-functional partners. The team is focused on improving detection quality, scaling security workflows for enterprise use, and strengthening how GitLab helps customers secure the software supply chain. For more on how this team works, see the Sec Engineering Handbook page.  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. We're looking for a technical engineering manager (UK Based) to lead a team building and operating large-scale distributed systems. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with strong operational instincts and a passion for building high-performing teams. You will lead the Geo for Self-Managed Customers team, which owns the Geo product end to end. Geo is tenant-to-tenant replication that sits between raw infrastructure replication and single-object transfer, and it is the foundation customers rely on for their disaster recovery strategies.  What you'll bring: * Proven track record building and owning large-scale distributed services, with the technical depth to dive into architecture and guide the team on technical strategy * Experience in driving operational excellence and you've owned services running at four-nines (99.99%) SLOs and know what it takes to keep them there * Experience leveraging AI tooling to boost team productivity, with real lessons learned from both wins and missteps * A history of building and managing high-performing, accountable team cultures, including managing out when necessary * Comfort driving complex projects to completion without relying on a dedicated TPM * Experience leading distributed and remote teams effectively Key Responsibilities: * Lead the roadmap and execution for the Geo product serving Self-Managed customers, setting clear direction in close partnership with the team’s Product Manager. * Hire and develop a high-performing engineering team where members can thrive and deliver with quality and speed; the team is India-anchored, with EMEA backend/fullstack hiring to improve timezone overlap. * Own the reliability, correctness, and performance of Geo replication as the core layer underpinning disaster recovery for Self-Managed deployments. * Deliver bug fixes, API extensions, and new capabilities to the shared Geo codebase, maintaining relationships with the Geo SMEs embedded in the Dedicated Migrations and Resilience teams so day-to-day commits resolve quickly. * Build and maintain runbooks, guardrails, and reviews so the team operates with rigor; ensure high-quality, timely responses to Geo-related escalations from Support and internal partners. * Define, track, and report on delivery and operational metrics, using them to drive continuous improvement. * Participate in the Incident Management on-call rotation to help ensure availability goals for Geo are met, working with reliability engineers and development team members. 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 a Staff Backend Engineer (AI) in the Verify stage at GitLab, you'll help shape and scale the core infrastructure behind GitLab CI. You'll play a central role in how we integrate AI into CI/CD workflows. Your work will impact performance, reliability, and usability for people running millions of CI jobs, from small teams to the largest enterprises. AI is a top priority in the year ahead. In this role, you'll go beyond using AI tools and help define how we design, build, and iterate on AI-assisted and agentic CI experiences. You'll set standards for what good looks like across our AI agent portfolio, including how we measure success, how we instrument behavior in production, and how we account for large language model limitations. You'll also help responsibly integrate GitLab's Duo Agent Platform into CI workflows at scale, on a foundation that's fast, reliable, secure, and observable. We have ambitious goals for Agentic CI in FY27. As a Staff Engineer, you will: * Partner with Engineering, Product, and UX leadership to pressure-test our priorities: where we can move faster, where we're missing data, and where there's whitespace to innovate. Part of this includes learning and growing with the Engineering team you will collaborate closely with. * Define what success looks like across our agent portfolio and make sure we're tracking against it — not just shipping, but learning. * Bring a sharp eye to the competitive landscape, helping us understand what it takes to keep GitLab CI best-in-class in an increasingly agentic world. * Examples of Agentic CI work we have planned for the upcoming year: * AI Pipeline Builder, the foundational CI agent that auto-creates pipelines for new projects and serves as the launchpad for onboarding new CI users. * Automate the Fix a Failing Pipeline flow at scale – from dogfooding on internal GitLab projects through to safe, controlled rollout for customers, solving real infrastructure and scalability challenges. * Build the instrumentation and observability layer that makes agentic CI trustworthy — trigger volume dashboards, retry rates, cost safeguards — so we can measure what's working, catch what isn't, and iterate with confidence. * Harden the CI pipeline execution infrastructure that these agents depend on: database access patterns, background processing, and job orchestration built to handle the additional load that AI-driven automation introduces at enterprise scale. WHAT YOU’LL DO * Shape and scale GitLab CI backend infrastructure to improve performance, reliability, and usability for users running jobs at high volume. * Design and implement AI-powered features for Agentic CI, including agents, agentic flows, and LLM-backed tooling that integrates with GitLab's Duo Agent Platform. * Define what success looks like for AI in CI before you build, including baselines, measurable outcomes, and clear signals that help the team learn and iterate. * Build the instrumentation and observability needed to make AI-assisted CI trustworthy in production, including feature behavior metrics, dashboards, and safeguards. * Own and drive measurable performance improvements across CI systems (for example, database access patterns, background processing, and job orchestration) by forming hypotheses, running experiments, and validating results with data. * Write secure, well-tested, maintainable Ruby on Rails code in a large monolith, improving existing features while reducing technical debt and operational risk. * Lead cross-functional technical work with Product, UX, and Infrastructure, influencing architecture and execution across the Verify stage. * Share standards, patterns, and learnings with other engineers, raising the bar for responsible AI integration and evidence-driven engineering across CI. WHAT YOU’LL BRING * Advanced proficiency with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, with experience building and maintaining reliable backend services in a large codebase. * Strong PostgreSQL skills, including data modeling, query tuning, and scaling large tables through proactive performance investigation and remediation. * Hands-on experience building, running, and debugging high-traffic production systems, ideally in CI, workflow orchestration, or adjacent infrastructure-heavy domains. * Practical experience designing and shipping AI-powered backend features and integrations, including sound judgment about large language model limitations and responsible use in production. * A data-driven approach to engineering: defining hypotheses, establishing baseline metrics, instrumenting changes, and measuring outcomes against clear success criteria. * Familiarity with observability patterns and tools (metrics, logging, tracing) to diagnose issues, improve reliability, and guide iteration. * Strong backend architecture and delivery practices, including secure design, well-tested code, and strategies for safe rollouts and zero-downtime changes. * Clear written and verbal communication skills, including writing technical proposals and documentation, and collaborating effectively in a remote, asynchronous, cross-functional environment. ABOUT THE TEAM The Verify stage focuses on collaboration, iteration, and helping GitLab users run fast, reliable, and scalable Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines for projects of all sizes, from small teams to large enterprises. For more on how we work, see Team Handbook Page and Related Initiative. Remote-Global 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.