Axel von Bertoldi
Cam Swords
Georgi Georgiev
Romuald Atchadé
Arran Walker
Ashvin Sharma
Staff Backend Engineer
Taka Nishida
Timo Furrer
Vishal TakEnvironments Group
The Environments group is responsible for the Environments in the Deploy stage of the DevOps lifecycle.
Runner
The GitLab Runner team page.
Vision
By 2025, our vision for GitLab Runner is that the runner’s setup and day-to-day operations at scale be an almost zero-friction experience.
Mission
Our mission is to enable organizations to efficiently run GitLab CI/CD jobs on any computing platform and do so in an operationally efficient and highly secure way at any scale.
Who We Are
Verify:Runner is made up of two teams:
CI Functions Platform
Runner Core
Runner Leadership
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
 Nicole Williams
|
Senior Engineering Manager, Runner |
 Adebayo Adesanya
|
Engineering Manager, Runner:Runner Core |
 Joe Burnett
|
Principal Engineer, Runner |
How To Contact Us
Slack
Requests for Help: For customer support requests please open an issue in the Request for Help project.
Stable Counterparts
For a comprehensive list of counterparts, look at the runner product categories.
Technical Vision
The Runner Core and CI Functions Platform teams’ priorities and technical roadmap are guided by the Runner technical vision, an architectural blueprint defining how GitLab Runner will evolve to support effortless installation, configuration, and execution of CI/CD workloads at any scale.
How We Work
Prioritization Framework
Our team maintains a clear commitment to prioritizing and scheduling work based on several critical factors (in priority order):
- Forced prioritization issues (infradev, security, availability) receive immediate resource allocation as our highest priority
- Critical Bug resolution to maintain quality and reliability
- Strategic direction features that advance our long-term vision
- Technical debt reduction to ensure sustainable development velocity
- Maintenance activities that keep our systems healthy
- Community contributions that deliver value to our users and support contributor engagement
This framework guides our resource allocation decisions and ensures we maintain focus on what matters most to GitLab Runner’s reliability, security, and continued evolution.
Shared Responsibilities
The Runner Core and CI Functions Platform groups operate autonomously but collaborate on specific responsibilities to distribute maintenance overhead.
Releases
At the end of each iteration, we release Runner and associated projects. The release process is documented in the releases project README.
We maintain a list of released Runner versions in the Runner project wiki.
Release Manager Rotation
Each milestone, an automated issue is created in the team-tasks project assigning one engineer as the release manager for that iteration. The automation is managed through the team-tasks-release-rotation project.
Each generated issue contains detailed instructions for completing the release process. If the assigned team member will be out of office during their assigned release period, they are responsible for finding a replacement.
Maintenance Rotations
The Runner teams have weekly rotating maintenance assignments to ensure consistent coverage for support, triage, and community engagement activities.
How It Works
Each week, an automated issue is created in the team-tasks project with role assignments for the week. Team members are automatically rotated through different responsibilities to balance the workload and ensure everyone maintains familiarity with all aspects of team operations.
Responsibilities
Detailed instructions for each section can be found in the team task generator issue template.
| Task | Description |
|---|---|
| 🐛 Bug Wrangler 🤠 | Responsible for triaging incoming bugs to ensure they have appropriate severity and priority labels. |
| 🛟 Support & Security Responder 🚒 | Responsible for monitoring, labeling and responding to incoming security vulnerabilities and support requests. You can find more details on our security review process on the team resources page. |
| 🥷 Merge Marauder 🏴☠️ | Responsible for ensuring community contributor merge requests receive timely attention. |
| 💬 Community Contribution Triager 📌 | Responsible for initial triage of new community contributions. |
Finding Your Assignment
Check the current week’s issue in the team-tasks project to see your assignment. Issues are automatically created each Monday with the week’s rotation schedule and include checkboxes for tracking completion of duties throughout the week.
Team Resources
See dedicated page.
Runner Group - JTBD
Overview The goal of this page is to create, share and iterate on the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) and …
Runner Group - Risk Map
The goal of this page is to document a general risk map for the Runner group.
Runner Group - Team Resources
The goal of this page is to document resources needed for day-to-day work within the Runner group.
Runner Group - User Stories
The GitLab Runner Group's user stories.
Verify:CI Functions Platform
The CI Functions Platform team page.
Verify:Runner Core
The Runner Core team page.
Verify:Runner Project Plans
This project's scope is to replace the current autoscaling technology, Docker Machine, used for the GitLab SaaS Shared Runners.
Last modified December 18, 2025: Update Runner Handbook Page (
ae8acce4)
