Director of Engineering, Workflows & Runners

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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).
• The base salary range

Benefits

Additional Information

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. 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. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software. * 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.

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