<div class="content-intro"><p>GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.</p> <p>The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZIb5zszQI">Co-create the future with us</a> as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.</p> <p>*<em>Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.</em></p></div><p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>About the role</strong></span></p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Senior Engineering Managers at GitLab own outcomes for a defined engineering domain, build and grow the team that delivers them, and are trusted to operate with significant autonomy against a clear mandate.</p> <p>This Senior Engineering Manager role focuses on driving non-linear productivity by building and leading a small, hand-picked team of engineers who find and fix the highest-leverage friction points in GitLab's own SDLC. Rather than incremental team management, this is a 0 to 1 team-building mandate. You will personally recruit 4 exceptional engineers, define how they work, and drive them through a root-cause, shift-left approach to engineering productivity, measured in system-level metrics (MRPM, pipeline success rate, pipeline latency), not story points or activity.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">You will act as a bridge between the pilot squad, engineering managers whose teams are affected by friction points, and leadership, ensuring the team's fixes deliver durable, measurable value before any of it is proposed as a permanent function.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">This role reports to a VP-level engineering leader.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>What you'll do</strong></span></p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Vision & Strategy</p> <ul> <li>Define and continuously refine the operating model for the non-linear productivity pilot: what "friction" means, how it's diagnosed, and how fixes are prioritized against the three system-level metrics.</li> <li>Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities (step-change fixes rather than incremental gains) across the SDLC, including flaky tests, review latency, pipeline reliability, tooling gaps, and context loss for both human and agentic contributors.</li> <li>Translate an intentionally broad, ambiguous mandate ("find the friction, fix it at the root") into a concrete, time-boxed roadmap with defined milestones for a 3-month pilot window.</li> </ul> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Team Building & Leadership</p> <ul> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Personally source, evaluate, and select 4 exceptional engineers for the pilot squad. You own this hiring bar directly rather than delegating it to a pipeline.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Negotiate allocation models (100% vs. partial/dual-hat) with each engineer's current EM, balancing team commitments against the pilot's needs.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Set the technical direction and working norms for a small, fast-moving team: how work is scoped, how decisions get made, and how progress gets reported.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Mentor the engineers on this team in root-cause diagnosis and shift-left thinking, raising the bar for rigor versus reaching for the nearest patch.</li> </ul> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Deep Technical Exploration & Experimentation</p> <ul> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Lead hands-on investigation to instrument and baseline the three top-level metrics (MRPM, pipeline success rate, pipeline latency) so the org has an honest starting point before any fix is proposed.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Diagnose the highest-leverage friction points dragging each metric down, and validate hypotheses with real data before committing team time to a fix.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Design and implement fixes that compound, including shift-left quality changes, tooling investment, and better context and interfaces for both humans and agents, rather than one-off patches.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Stay hands-on enough to review architecture, dig into pipeline internals, and unblock the team on hard technical problems directly.</li> </ul> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Internal Adoption & Non-Linear Productivity</p> <ul> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Own a small set of high-impact friction areas as pathfinders, driving each from diagnosis through fix to measurable metric movement.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Work directly with affected engineering teams to ensure fixes are trusted, adopted, and don't quietly get reverted or worked around.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Track and report metric movement honestly, including when a bet didn't pay off.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Capture and codify reusable patterns and playbooks so that fixes validated by this team can be adopted org-wide with minimal friction.</li> </ul> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Operations, Risk & Enablement</p> <ul> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Set a cadence for reporting impact back to EM peers and leadership, framed around metric movement rather than activity.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Ensure the pilot's fixes degrade gracefully and don't introduce new reliability risk into CI/CD systems that other teams depend on.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Help define what "graduation" from pilot to permanent function looks like, and build the case (or the honest counter-case) based on results.</li> </ul> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>What you'll bring</strong></span></p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">General</p> <ul> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Track record leading small, high-autonomy engineering teams, ideally in developer productivity, CI/CD, platform, or infrastructure reliability, measured on system-level outcomes rather than feature delivery.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Deep comfort with CI/CD and build systems. You understand why pipelines flake, why they're slow, and what actually moves success-rate and latency numbers versus what just feels like progress.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Demonstrated root-cause instinct and a bar for talent over headcount: you'd rather run understaffed than fill a seat with someone good-enough.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Comfort operating under metrics-driven accountability, including publicly baselining a number and reporting honestly against it.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Strong executive-level communication. This pilot has direct visibility to engineering leadership.</li> </ul> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Nice to have</p> <ul> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Experience with agentic or AI-assisted development workflows, and a view on where human/agent friction shows up differently than pure human friction.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Prior experience running a defined-window pilot or 0 to 1 initiative with explicit success criteria.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Familiarity with GitLab's own CI/CD internals, or equivalent depth on another large-scale build/test system.</li> </ul><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p><em>The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our <a class="waffle-rich-text-link" href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/benefits/general-and-entity-benefits/" data-sheets-formula-bar-text-link="https://bit.ly/GLBeneUS" data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:12px;color:#1155cc;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;font-family:''Arial'';font-style:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;">benefits</a><span data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:12px;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:'Arial';font-style:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;"> and </span><a class="waffle-rich-text-link" href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/stock-options/" data-sheets-formula-bar-text-link="https://bit.ly/GLequity" data-sheets-formula-bar-text-style="font-size:12px;color:#1155cc;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;font-family:''Arial'';font-style:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none;">equity</a>. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.</em></p></div><div class="title">United States Salary Range</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$190,000</span><span class="divider">—</span><span>$245,000 USD</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><h4><strong>How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees</strong></h4> <ul> <li><a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/benefits/general-and-entity-benefits/">Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/time-off-and-absence/time-off-types/#flexible-paid-time-off-pto">Flexible Paid Time Off </a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-tmag/">Team Member Resource Groups</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/stock-options/">Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/learning-and-development/growth-and-development/">Growth and Development Fund</a></li> <li><a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/benefits/general-and-entity-benefits/#parental-leave">Parental Leave</a> </li> </ul> <p>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 <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/#examples-of-select-underrepresented-groups">underrepresented groups</a> 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.</p> <hr> <p><strong>Country Hiring Guidelines: </strong>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.  </p> <p><strong>Privacy Policy: </strong>Please review our <a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/candidate-faq/recruitment-privacy-policy/" target="_blank">Recruitment Privacy Policy.</a> Your privacy is important to us.</p> <p>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 <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-policies/inc-usa/#equal-employment-opportunity-policy" target="_blank">GitLab’s EEO Policy</a> and <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/labor-and-employment-notices/#eeoc-us-equal-employment-opportunity-commission-notices" target="_blank">EEO is the Law</a>. If you have a disability or special need that requires <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-policies/inc-usa/#reasonable-accommodation" target="_blank">accommodation</a>, please let us know during the <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/interviewing/#adjustments-to-our-interview-process" target="_blank">recruiting process</a>.</p></div>

Senior Engineering Manager, Non-Linear Productivity

Job Description