Director of Engineering, GitLab
Workflows & Runners
$230-285k
+ Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
One DevOps platform
Be an early applicant
One DevOps platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$230-285k
+ 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
- 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)
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
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: $434.8m
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.
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