Director of Engineering, Organizations & Cells

What you will do Delivery of the Cells and Organizations roadmap — cell provisioning and lifecycle, the routing and topology layer, organization data migration tooling, and feature parity across the platform. Migration execution. Cohort-based movement of customer Organizations onto cells with zero data loss, verified rollback, and no downtime outside the tenant in flight. A multi-cloud, multi-region cell footprint and the architectural decisions that govern what stays cell-local and what crosses boundaries. The engineering organization. Hire, level, and develop managers and senior ICs across several teams. Set the technical bar and the operating cadence. Cross-functional leadership. This charter touches nearly every product group at GitLab. You will drive commitments and sequencing with peer engineering leaders, Product, Infrastructure, and Security — much of it asynchronously, across time zones, in public issues and merge requests. How success is measured Customer Organizations running on cells in production, migrated cleanly and on schedule. Availability and latency improvements attributable to isolation and load distribution. Infrastructure cost per unit of capacity trending down as the footprint grows. Throughput and retention of the teams you build. What you will bring Engineering leadership at director scale Experience leading multiple teams through managers (roughly 25–60 engineers), including hiring and developing managers. A track record of shipping multi-quarter infrastructure programs with hard external dependencies — the kind where the hardest problem is sequencing across ten teams, not writing the code. Comfort operating as a peer to VPs and staff-plus engineers: you can hold an architectural position on technical merit and change it when the evidence changes. Strong written communication. GitLab is remote and asynchronous by default; influence here is exercised in documents. Distributed systems depth You have built and operated large-scale distributed systems in production — multi-tenant SaaS, sharded or cell-based architectures, control planes, or data platforms at comparable scale. Working fluency in relational database scaling (partitioning, sharding, replication), data migration at scale, and request routing. Real operational experience: incident command, capacity planning, and designing for blast-radius containment. Cloud infrastructure at depth on at least one major provider, ideally more than one. AI-native engineering You understand what agentic access patterns do to a platform's read volume, concurrency, and authorization model, and you design for that rather than retrofitting it. You use AI tooling in your own engineering practice and have raised the bar for it across a team. 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. : Please review our Recruitment . 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 .