Manager, Engineering, Nonlinear Productivity (Friction Elimination & Solutions)

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. About the Role We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer to pioneer and scale autonomous, agentic SDLC capabilities across GitLab. Distinguished Engineers are recognized experts across multiple technology domains and represent the most senior level of technical leadership within and across divisions at the company. In this role you will deeply immerse in GitLab's product and internal engineering workflows to identify classes of problems that can be wholly or largely addressed by AI agents, validate them through rigorous experimentation in production-adjacent environments, and codify patterns that can be productized for our millions of users. You will act as a bridge between Architecture, Product, Infrastructure, and Data and ML teams, ensuring that agentic capabilities deliver durable value internally first and then scale reliably and securely to our customers. Additionally, the level for this role will be determined through the interview process and may be scoped as either Distinguished Engineer or Fellow Engineer based on the depth and breadth of experience demonstrated. What You'll Do * Define and continuously refine a company-wide technical vision for autonomous, agentic SDLC that aligns with GitLab's product strategy and Engineering job architecture. * Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities across the SDLC, from planning and coding to review, security, compliance, and operations, targeting 10x step changes rather than incremental gains. * Translate ambiguous problem spaces into concrete, iterable roadmaps in partnership with Product, AI and ML, and Architecture teams. * Lead hands-on experiments and prototypes to validate where agentic workflows can fully own or materially reshape engineering tasks, including autonomous MR authoring, test creation and triage, security remediation, release readiness, and incident response. * Design and implement reference architectures for agentic SDLC inside GitLab, including orchestration patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and human-in-the-loop controls. * Define evaluation frameworks using offline benchmarks and online experiments to measure correctness, latency, safety, cost, and productivity impact of agentic workflows. * Select and own a small set of high-impact internal use cases as pathfinders and drive them from concept through adoption to measurable productivity gains. * Work directly with engineering teams to embed agentic workflows into day-to-day development, ensuring they are trusted, observable, and resilient. * Define and track core productivity metrics such as cycle time, MTTR, and MR throughput, and link agentic interventions to real business outcomes. * Capture and codify reusable patterns, libraries, and playbooks that other teams can adopt with minimal friction. * Work with Product Management and Engineering leadership to convert proven internal patterns into product capabilities that can be safely and reliably offered to customers. * Ensure designs respect multi-tenant, compliance, and data governance requirements across GitLab.com and self-managed customers. * Serve as a point of escalation for complex technical and architectural decisions related to agentic workflows, AI safety, and large-scale systems integration. * Mentor Principal and Staff Engineers working on AI and agentic efforts, raising the overall bar for technical execution, experimentation rigor, and cross-team collaboration. * Write clear, opinionated design documents, architecture narratives, and decision records that help teams make aligned, high-quality decisions independently. * Represent GitLab in the broader ecosystem at conferences, standards groups, and open source communities on topics such as AI-assisted development, autonomous agents, and productivity measurement. * Partner with Security and Compliance to define guardrails, review processes, and monitoring for agentic features, ensuring responsible use of AI and protection of customer data. * Work with Reliability and SRE teams to ensure that agentic services are observable, debuggable, and resilient, and that failure modes degrade gracefully. What You'll Bring * 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leadership role. * Deep expertise in AI and ML systems, including large language models, agentic frameworks, and autonomous workflow design at production scale. * Proven track record of leading hands-on technical experimentation, including defining evaluation frameworks, running benchmarks, and translating findings into scalable architecture decisions. * Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, including service decomposition, fault tolerance, observability, and operational resilience. * Experience designing and implementing human-in-the-loop controls, safety guardrails, and responsible AI practices for production systems. * Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and Data and ML teams on complex, ambiguous technical challenges. * Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams or divisions without direct authority. * Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization with excellent written and asynchronous communication skills. * Familiarity with GitLab's DevSecOps platform, CI/CD primitives, and the software development lifecycle is a strong plus. 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 $260,000—$418,000 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 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 Engineering Manager at GitLab, you’ll manage and grow a high-performing engineering team within the Data Foundations group, working on a core data platform that ingests, processes, persists, and queries data streams generated across GitLab. We are looking for a leader who can leverage AI to drive non-linear productivity gains across the platform, accelerating our ability to deliver value to our customers. We’re looking for someone with deep distributed systems knowledge. You’ll need to be comfortable going well beyond people management and into the architecture of high-throughput, multi-component data systems: ingestion, buffering, enrichment, replication, storage, querying, backpressure handling, isolation, and production operations across multiple deployment models. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Data, and other Engineering teams to evolve a platform that lives inside the product, keeps external services to a minimum, and runs across GitLab.com, Dedicated, Self-Managed, and Cells-based deployments. In addition to Data Insights Platform, this role will take on classic search scope as the team joins the Data Foundations organization. You’ll help lead architecture and execution across both GitLab’s analytics platform and classic search capabilities, balancing platform depth with customer-facing impact. You’ll help lead architecture and execution across both GitLab’s analytics platform and classic search capabilities, balancing platform depth with customer-facing impact. In this role, you’ll balance technical guidance with people management. You’ll hire, coach, and develop engineers while also helping drive architecture and execution across a platform built around stateless ingesters, Siphon CDC replication, NATS/JetStream buffering, enrichment pipelines, ClickHouse-backed storage, and a Query API that interfaces with the GitLab Rails monolith. In Data Foundations, we build the engineering systems that make platform data reliable, scalable, and available to product teams across GitLab, and you’ll help guide that work. WHAT YOU’LL DO * Hire, manage, and enable a high-performing Data Insights Platform engineering team, creating an environment where team members can do their best work and deliver strong results. * Partner closely with product managers, product designers, and peer engineering managers to define and deliver the roadmap for Data Insights Platform (DIP) and related Platform Insights initiatives such as Siphon, Query API integrations, classic search initiatives, and self-service reporting foundations. * Own delivery for your team, including planning, prioritization, execution, and operational follow-through across architecture work, platform improvements, and production readiness, with clear accountability for roadmap milestones and delivery outcomes. * Guide the technical design of distributed data-path components, including ingestion, buffering, enrichment, exporting, and querying, and shape architecture choices on sharding, partitioning, component-specific scaling, failure recovery, and tenant isolation across SaaS, Dedicated, self-managed, and Cells deployments, with a strong focus on reliability, throughput, operability, and maintainability. * Help the team design safe and scalable integrations with the GitLab monolith, including gRPC/Protobuf-based query paths and clear ownership boundaries between DIP and product teams building user-facing GraphQL or REST endpoints. * Drive a high bar for security, privacy, and governance in how platform data is handled, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and safe handling of data with different privacy classifications. * Improve operational maturity across the platform, including observability, metrics, logging, readiness, capacity planning, performance monitoring, and clear runbooks for managed environments, with a focus on improving availability, throughput, latency, and time to recovery. * Collaborate asynchronously across teams and functions to help GitLab land customer-facing reporting capabilities on top of a strong, scalable data foundation. * Lead the design and evolution of the platform with a focus on modular architecture, ensuring systems are extensible and ready for AI-driven integrations. WHAT YOU’LL BRING * Experience managing platform, infrastructure, or data systems teams at scale, with a track record of building high-performing, values-aligned teams. * Deep distributed systems expertise, including strong judgment on service boundaries, asynchronous pipelines, backpressure, fault tolerance, horizontal scalability, and operating multi-component systems in production. * Strong technical background in backend and platform engineering, with the ability to guide architecture for high-throughput event pipelines and data systems. * Experience with technologies and patterns relevant to this space, such as change data capture, event streaming or messaging systems, OLAP data stores, query-serving layers, and service-to-service APIs. * Ability to hire, develop, and coach team members while still contributing technical guidance on complex architecture and delivery tradeoffs. * Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, especially when ownership is split between platform teams and feature teams consuming common infrastructure or APIs. * Experience building or operating systems across multiple deployment models, with sound judgment about the tradeoffs between GitLab.com, Dedicated, self-managed, and cell-based environments. * Strong written communication skills and the ability to work effectively in an all-remote, asynchronous environment. * Familiarity with search, indexing, and query-serving systems is a strong plus. * A deep passion for reliability, customer outcomes, and engineering and operational excellence, with a proven track record of instilling these values in high-performing teams. ABOUT THE TEAM In Data Foundations, we enable customers to self-serve reporting with scalable architecture. Our vision is to build a comprehensive dashboards-as-a-service framework that uses AI and relies on scalable data infrastructure. Data Insights Platform is one of our central initiatives, and we play a key role in advancing self-service reporting across GitLab. This is the foundational layer every reporting and intelligence surface at GitLab depends on — from product dashboards to Software Engineering Intelligence to the GitLab Knowledge Graph. In addition to Data Insights Platform, the team’s scope will include classic search as part of the broader Data Foundations organization.This brings together foundational analytics and search capabilities that help customers generate insights from product data and find relevant information across GitLab. We partner closely with product teams to turn DIP’s real-time insights, Postgres-to-ClickHouse replication, event routing, and downstream exports into dashboards, agent experiences, and customer-facing reporting. The scale expectations are real: we handle very large event volumes, with current and projected usage in the hundreds of millions of events per day. For more on how we work, see: * Platform Insights Group * Data Insights Platform architecture blueprint * Data Insights Platform Querying API 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 $152,800—$259,200 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.