Director of Engineering

An overview of this role

As Director, Engineering, Platform Operations & Productivity, you'll own three functions that all require hands-on technical depth, not just people management.

Platform Staff is a small, senior, AI-native team that moves to wherever the organization needs the most leverage, from standing up early scaffolding for an initiative, to taking on a high-impact customer request that doesn't fit any existing team's charter, to stepping directly into a production crisis until it's resolved.

This role is for a technical engineering director who has personally built distributed systems, not only managed people who did. You'll use clear metrics, strong operating rhythms, and direct technical judgment so these teams deliver predictable outcomes without relying on one-person heroics.

What you’ll do

• Own outcomes for Git & Gitaly Operations, including hiring and developing the Manager, Git & Gitaly Operations, and holding the function to its reliability bar across Self-Managed, GitLab Dedicated, and SaaS.
• Own outcomes for Nonlinear Productivity, also known as Friction Elimination, including hiring and developing the Manager, Nonlinear Productivity, and holding the function to measurable metric movement rather than activity.
• Build and oversee Platform Staff directly as a small, senior team that uses AI-assisted tools as a standard part of its work.
• Assess, case by case, what Platform Staff picks up, such as a new team that needs bootstrapping, a customer request too specific for any existing team's charter, or a crisis that needs someone in the room immediately.
• Assess when Platform Staff should hand work off to a permanent team once it's stable.
• Set the technical bar across all three functions by personally reviewing distributed systems designs, friction-elimination fixes, and crisis management plans with equal depth.
• Build the operating rhythm and metrics that keep all three functions running predictably, so none of them relies on any one person working unsustainable hours.
• Represent all three functions to peer engineering stakeholders, and step in front of customers directly when Platform Staff is engaged mid-crisis.

What you’ll bring

• Working knowledge of GitLab's development workflows and platform capabilities so you can assess productivity friction, operational trade-offs, and team needs in context.
• Hands-on experience designing and shipping distributed systems personally, not only through teams you've managed.
• A track record running highly effective engineering operations, including production reliability and incident management, at meaningful scale.
• A track record driving measurable engineering productivity improvements across more than one team or organization.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools, and sound judgment about when they help a small team do work that would otherwise require a larger team.
• People management experience across multiple managers or functions at once.
• Ability to context-switch effectively across genuinely different problem types, including infrastructure operations, developer productivity, and ad hoc crisis response, sometimes in the same week.
• A track record making staffing decisions that keep a high-leverage team intentionally small, and building alignment around those decisions rather than growing the team by default.

About the team

We work across three connected platform and productivity functions. Through Git & Gitaly Operations, we are responsible for the production reliability of the infrastructure layer underneath GitLab's own version control system. Through Nonlinear Productivity, we drive measurable improvements to GitLab's software development lifecycle and code-generation workflows. Through Platform Staff, we provide focused senior engineering capacity for high-leverage work that needs direct ownership before it can be stabilized or handed off to a permanent team.

Collectively, we help GitLab improve the reliability, productivity, and responsiveness of the platform that powers how our customers and GitLab team members build software.