Backend Engineering Manager

The Backend Engineering Manager specializes in Backend Engineering Management as a manager of people. Engineering Managers at GitLab see their team as their product. While they are technically credible and know the details of what engineers work on, their time is spent safeguarding their team’s health, hiring a world-class team, and putting them in the best position to succeed. They own the delivery of product commitments and are always looking to improve productivity. They must also coordinate across departments to accomplish collaborative goals.

Job Grade

The Backend Engineering Manager role is a grade 8.

Responsibilities

• Help your engineers grow their skills and experience
• Author project plans for epics
• Run agile project management processes
• Conduct code reviews, and make technical contributions to product architecture as well as getting involved in solving bugs and delivering small features
• Actively seek and hire globally-distributed talent
• Conduct managerial interviews for candidates, and train the team to do technical interviews
• Contribute to the sense of psychological safety on your team
• Generate and implement process improvements
• Hold regular 1:1’s with all members of their team
• Give regular and clear feedback around the individual’s performance
• Foster technical decision making on the team, but make final decisions when necessary
• Draft quarterly OKRs and Engineering KPIs
• Improve product quality, security, and performance
• May have more than one specialty on their team, per our shared manager team concept
• Participate in the Incident Management on-call rotation to help ensure the availability goals for GitLab.com are met, by working with reliability engineers and development team members.

Requirements

• Ability to use GitLab
• Exquisite brokering skills: regularly achieve consensus amongst departments
• Demonstrated progressive experience in a leadership role with current technical experience
• In-depth experience with Ruby on Rails, Go, and/or Git, in addition to any experience required by the position’s specialty
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• You share our values, and work in accordance with those values

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in a peak performance organization
• Deep Ruby on Rails experience
• Golang experience
• Product company experience
• Startup experience
• Enterprise software company experience
• Computer science education or equivalent experience
• Passionate about open source and developer tools

Levels

• Intermediate
• Senior
• Staff
• Backend Engineering Manager

Performance Indicators

Backend Engineering Managers have the following job-family performance indicators. Performance indicators for a Manager role usually apply to the team, meaning the manager and their direct reports.

• Open MR Review Time (OMRT)
• Open MR Age (OMA)
• Response to Community SLO
• Hiring Actual vs. Plan
• Development Department merge request rate
• Diversity
• Handbook Update Frequency
• Team Member Retention

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find their job title on our team page.

• Qualified candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Global Recruiters. {Insert hiring process steps here.}

Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

About Gitlab

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.

We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.

Top 10 Reasons to Work for GitLab:

1. Mission: Everyone can contribute
2. Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
3. Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
4. Transparency: Over 2,000 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
5. Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
6. Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity, Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
7. Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
8. Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
9. Work/Life Harmony: Flexible workday, Family and Friends days
10. Remote Done Right: One of the world's largest all-remote companies, prolific inventor of remote best practices

See our culture page for more!

Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto and guides.