Director of Engineering, GitLab
Security Risk Management
$194.8-365.2k
+ Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
One DevOps platform
Open for applications
One DevOps platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$194.8-365.2k
+ Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make it so that everyone can contribute. When everyone can contribute, users become contributors and we greatly increase the rate of innovation.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years leading distributed systems at scale (>100M daily operations)
- Deep expertise in designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems with complex data models
- Proven experience with polyglot persistence strategies, including relational databases (PostgreSQL, Cloud Spanner), time-series databases, graph databases, and distributed key-value stores
- Strong background in stream processing frameworks (Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or similar) and event-driven architectures
- Hands-on experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and cloud-native observability stacks
- Security domain knowledge with understanding of vulnerability assessment, static analysis, dependency scanning, or application security testing
- Proven track record of leading and growing high-performing engineering teams (40+ engineers)
- Experience transforming engineering culture and establishing technical excellence standards in fast-growing organizations
- Strong technical communication skills with ability to present complex architectural decisions to executive stakeholders
- Collaborative leadership style with experience working across multiple engineering teams and product stakeholders
- Systems thinking approach to complex technical problems with demonstrated ability to make appropriate trade-offs between performance, scalability, and maintainability
- Experience with A/B testing frameworks and data-driven decision making in technical contexts
- Track record of successfully delivering large-scale technical migrations or architectural transformations
- Startup or high-growth company experience with ability to balance technical debt with rapid feature delivery
What the job involves
- We're seeking an exceptional Engineering Lead to drive the evolution of GitLab's Security Risk Management (SRM) stage into a world-class platform for vulnerability analysis and remediation at enterprise scale
- This is a rare opportunity to architect and build distributed systems that will fundamentally change how large organizations approach application security and developer security workflows
- As the SRM Stage Lead, you'll be responsible for transforming our engineering culture toward high-performance distributed systems while delivering an exceptional user experience for both Application Security professionals and Developers
- You'll own the technical strategy for processing, analyzing, and remediating vulnerabilities across massive codebases and complex enterprise environments
- Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Design distributed systems architecture capable of processing vulnerability data from thousands of repositories, millions of commits, and complex dependency graphs in real-time
- Drive storage system decisions for multi-petabyte security datasets, balancing query performance, cost efficiency, and data retention requirements across time-series, graph, and document storage paradigms
- Architect scalable analysis pipelines that can ingest vulnerability feeds, correlate findings across multiple security tools, and provide actionable intelligence to both security teams and individual developers
- Lead the technical evolution from monolithic security scanning to microservices-based, event-driven vulnerability management systems
- Engineering Culture Transformation
- Champion high-performance systems thinking throughout the team, establishing patterns for horizontal scaling, efficient resource utilization, and fault-tolerant distributed computing
- Establish technical standards for system observability, chaos engineering, and performance optimization in security-critical systems
- Mentor and develop senior engineers in distributed systems design, database optimization, and large-scale system architecture
- Drive architectural decision records (ADRs) for major technical decisions, particularly around data storage, processing frameworks, and system boundaries
- Product & User Experience Excellence
- Own the end-to-end user journey (in partnership with PM) for both AppSec professionals managing enterprise-wide risk and developers receiving actionable security feedback in their workflow
- Design APIs and interfaces that abstract complexity while providing the power and flexibility that security professionals demand
- Collaborate with Product Management, UX and Product Design to translate complex technical capabilities into intuitive user experiences
- Establish feedback loops with large enterprise customers to ensure our technical solutions scale with their organizational complexity
- Strategic Technical Execution
- Evaluate and integrate cutting-edge technologies in areas such as graph databases, stream processing, machine learning inference at scale, and distributed caching, in collaboration with GitLab’s Infrastructure, Data and AI teams
- Own the technical roadmap for vulnerability correlation, risk scoring, and automated remediation workflows
- Drive partnerships with other GitLab stages to ensure seamless integration across the DevSecOps platform
- Lead incident response for availability and performance issues in customer-facing security systems
- Security Risk Management sits at the heart of modern DevSecOps. The systems you build will directly impact how Fortune 500 companies protect their applications and how millions of developers integrate security into their daily workflow
- You'll have the opportunity to define the future of application security tooling while working with some of the most challenging distributed systems problems in the industry
- The Technical Challenge
- You'll be solving some of the most interesting distributed systems problems in the security space:
- Scale: Processing vulnerability data for organizations with 100,000+ repositories and millions of developers
- Performance: Sub-second query response times for complex security analytics across massive datasets
- Reliability: 99.95%+ uptime SLAs for security-critical workflows that can't afford downtime
- Complexity: Correlating findings across 20+ different security tools while maintaining data lineage and audit trails
- User Experience: Making complex security data accessible to both security experts and developers with varying security expertise
Our take
GitLab is an open-source collaboration platform for developers. It enables teams to build code quickly from anywhere without compromising on security or quality. GitLab already has an estimated 30M+ users from all over the world.
According to a 2021 GitLab report, 60% of developers can release code 2x faster with DevOps platforms that bring teams together and accelerate processes. It stands out by catering to programmers of all experiences. Gitlab's version control system helps streamline the process of creating, maintaining, and deploying code, whoever you are.
GitLab was in the right place to capitalise on the recent trend toward rapid digital transformation and remote working. This trend is expected to grow, and with it, GitLab's popularity. With its successful 2021 IPO and the patronage of major brands such as Nasdaq and Jaguar Land Rover, GitLab is expected to solidify its position as the go-to platform for development teams.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
15% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Sep 2019
$268m
SERIES E
Dec 2018
$20m
SERIES D
Total funding: $434.7m
Company benefits
- We offer benefits to manage your health, wealth, and well-being regardless of location
- Flexibility in schedule to be there for life’s important moments
- Equity compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan offered
- Generous Paid Time Off
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Sid Sijbrandij
(CEO)Studied Physics at the University of Twente. Interned at P&G and IBM. Was Lead Architect at the Netherlands' Ministry of Justice from 2009 to 2012. Founded app store Comcoaster in 2008, and then co-founded GitLab in 2012.
Share this job
View 94 more jobs at GitLab