Director, Engineering, Platform Operations & Productivity

GitLab is hiring a Director, Engineering, Platform Operations & Productivity in Bangalore.

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, in

Responsibilities

• 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.

About GitLab

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 ca