Senior Director, Production and Tenant Platform Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Spearhead a Unified Platform Strategy: Formulate and implement a comprehensive roadmap that aligns Production Engineering (Fleet, Network, Cost, Responder) with Tenant Experience (Observability, Controls, Upgrade Tooling). Ensure these initiatives integrate seamlessly to support GitLab’s multi-tenant and self-managed environments.

• Promote Operational Excellence & Reliability: Take full responsibility for GitLab’s production results. You will manage incident response, alert effectiveness, and service-level reliability, ensuring that both GitLab.com and our global customer base benefit from a stable, high-performing platform.

• Scale Engineering Leadership: Oversee a senior management team, mentoring them on performance, recruitment, team organization, and execution. You will establish the organizational framework for success—setting clear mandates, eliminating obstacles, and nurturing a culture of ownership and accountability.

• Advance the Platform Architecture: Steer the technical progression of the platform. This includes optimizing fleet management and cloud utilization, advancing our observability and self-healing frameworks, and providing a modern upgrade experience that connects legacy Omnibus with contemporary Kubernetes/cloud-native models.

• Foster Cross-Functional Partnerships: Work alongside Engineering Directors, Product Leaders, and Reliability/Delivery teams to ensure platform investments are in harmony with business objectives (e.g., AI roadmap, cost targets, deployment velocity).

• Transform Strategy into Action: Translate broad organizational objectives into practical roadmaps. You will navigate difficult trade-off decisions between immediate production reliability and long-term architectural health, ensuring the team remains focused on outcomes that generate business value.

• Shape the Future of GitLab Operations: Advocate for initiatives that minimize operational toil, enhance the developer/operator experience, and standardize platform interfaces across our modular service architecture.

⛳️ Requirements

• Executive Engineering Leadership: Demonstrated experience managing large, distributed engineering teams (overseeing managers) within complex, high-scale platform settings.

• In-Depth Production Expertise: A history of owning critical production systems. You comprehend the realities of operating distributed systems at scale, including incident management, traffic coordination, capacity planning, and cloud infrastructure expenses.

• Platform Engineering Knowledge: Extensive familiarity with large-scale distributed systems, along with various delivery methods such as containerized and Kubernetes-based platforms, infrastructure-as-code, and the operational challenges of supporting multi-tenant SaaS alongside varied self-managed (Omnibus/OAK) deployments.

• Strategic Architectural Insight: Capability to assess complex technical trade-offs—such as build vs. buy, cloud-first vs. on-premises limitations, and architectural patterns for modular services—and provide clear, justifiable guidance.

• Change Management Experience: Proven record of leading teams through significant growth, organizational transformation, or technical shifts (e.g., modernizing a monolith or scaling infrastructure for new product lines).

• Alignment with GitLab Values: Strong commitment to our values of ownership, speed with quality, and customer-focused outcomes.

• Operational Focus: A proven track record of enhancing production quality. You have successfully led initiatives that have measurably improved system reliability, reduced operational toil, or optimized infrastructure efficiency.

🏝️ Benefits

• 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