Organizations Team

About

The Organizations team’s main focus is to develop the Organization entity needed for data sharding and isolation in the context of Cells. The team also offers support for groups, projects, and user profiles within our product.

Contact

To get in touch with us, it’s best to create an issue in the relevant project (typically GitLab) and add the ~"group::organizations" label, along with any other appropriate labels.

For urgent items, feel free to use the Slack channel (internal): #g_organizations.

Vision

The team is working on developing a more scalable, unified architecture for GitLab through the implementation of Organizations as a new top-level entity.

Organizations serve as logical containers that enable distribution across a cellular architecture while bridging functionality gaps between self-managed and SaaS GitLab instances. The new Organizations entity acts as an umbrella for multiple top-level groups, allowing enterprises to aggregate content across groups, implement organization-wide roles, and isolate content from other Organizations.

Simultaneously, the team aims to improve Groups and Projects by addressing several key challenges: creating more flexible hierarchies to accommodate diverse enterprise structures, reducing confusion around project nesting within groups, enhancing discoverability across the product, standardizing deletion and recovery processes, and improving archiving functionality and visibility. These improvements collectively work toward creating a more intuitive, flexible system for enterprises to represent their business structure and manage permissions.

Goals

The executive summary goals for the Organizations group include:

• Support GitLab.com’s daily-active user growth
• Do not allow a problem with any given data store to affect all users
• Minimize or eliminate complexity for our self-managed use case

Team Members

The following people are permanent members of the Organizations group:

Name	Role
Matt Andrews	Engineering Manager
Abdul Wadood	Senior Backend Engineer, Organizations
Alex Pooley	Staff Backend Engineer, Organizations
Drew Blessing	Senior Backend Engineer, Organizations
Peter Hegman	Senior Frontend Engineer, Organizations
Rutger Wessels	Senior Backend Engineer, Organizations
Shubham Kumar	Backend Engineer, Organizations
Shane Maglangit	Fullstack Engineer, Organizations
Tim McCarthy	Backend Engineer, Organizations

Stable Counterparts

The following members of other functional teams are our stable counterparts:

Name	Role
Emily Sahlani	Senior Technical Writer, GitLab Dedicated and Tenant Scale (Organizations, Cells Infrastructure)
Lorena Ciutacu	Technical Writer - Data Stores:Tenant Scale, Monitor:Product Analytics, Plan:Optimize
Christina Lohr	Senior Product Manager, Tenant Scale:Groups and Projects
Mark Wood	Acting Group Manager, Product, Tenant Scale & Data Access
Nick Nguyen	Senior Engineering Manager, Tenant Scale
Quang-Minh Nguyen	Staff Backend Engineer, Gitaly and Tenant Scale
Rémy Coutable	Principal Engineer, Tenant Scale
Rohit Shambhuni	Senior Security Engineer, Application Security, Manage (Authentication and Authorization), SaaS Platforms (Scalability) and Data Stores (Tenant Scale).
Sampath Ranasinghe	Senior Product Manager, Tenant Scale:Migrations
Steve Xuereb	Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Tenant Scale
Thong Kuah	Principal Engineer, Tenant Scale

Organization Rollout Counterparts

The following people are supporting our rollout of Organizations.

Name	Role
Andrew Evans	Senior Backend Engineer, Software Supply Chain Security:Authentication

Projects

We are working on different large projects where each project has a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI). The role of the DRI involves helping to define the scope of the work needed for the project, ensuring clarity on objectives with the responsibility of looking forward 3-6 months to identify potential blocks or risks. Their work is not limited to that area and they also work in other areas as needed.

Meetings

We are a globally distributed group and we communicate mostly asynchronously, however, we also have synchronous meetings. It’s unlikely everyone can attend those meetings, so we record them and share written summaries (agenda).

We currently have the following recurring meetings scheduled:

Weekly Wednesday - Organizations Team Sync

• APAC – 04:00 UTC
• EMEA/AMER – 15:00 UTC

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