Engineering Leadership
The Engineering Leadership becomes a cross-discipline management.
A Senior Engineering Manager
manages Engineering Managers
with fullstack teams (frontend, backend, and fullstack engineers), and/or Engineering Individual Contributors (frontend, backend, and fullstack engineers)
Engineering Development Management Roles
Senior Engineering Manager, Development
The Senior Engineering Manager, Development role extends the Engineering Manager role.
Job Grade
The Senior Engineering Manager, Development is a grade 9.
Responsibilities
- Manage up to six engineering teams
- Conduct managerial interviews for candidates, and train engineering managers to do said interviews
- Generate and implement process improvements, especially cross-team processes
- Hold regular 1:1s with team managers and skip-level 1:1s with all members of their team
- Management mentorship
Requirements
- Technical credibility: Past experience as a product engineer and leading teams thereof
- Management credibility: Past experience (3 to 5 years) as an engineering manager
- Ability to understand, communicate and improve the quality of multiple teams
- Demonstrate longevity at at least one recent job
- Ability to be successful managing at a remote-only company
- Humble, servant leader
- Ability to use GitLab
Nice-to-have Requirements
- Be a user of GitLab, or familiar with our company
- Prior Developer Platform or Tool industry experience
- Prior product company experience
- Prior high-growth startup experience
- Experience working on systems at massive (i.e. consumer) scale
- Deep open source experience
- Experience working with global teams
- We value diversity, inclusion and belonging in leadership
- Be inquisitive: Ask great questions
Director, Development
The Director of Development role extends the Senior Engineering Manager role.
Job Grade
The Director, Development is a grade 10.
Requirements
- Excellent communication skills
- Expert hiring manager skills and experience
- A strong people management philosophy for managers and engineers
- Experience managing managers
- Agile project management skills
- Ability to understand, communicate and improve the quality of multiple teams
- Demonstrate longevity at at least one recent job
- Ability to be successful managing at a remote-only company
- Humble, servant leader
Nice-to-have Requirements
- Be a user of GitLab, or familiar with our company
- Prior Developer Platform or Tool industry experience
- Prior product company experience
- Prior high-growth startup experience
- Experience working on systems at massive (i.e. consumer) scale
- Deep open source experience
- Experience working with global teams
- We value diversity, inclusion and belonging in leadership
- Be inquisitive: Ask great questions
Distinguished Engineer
Job Grade
The Distinguished Engineer is a grade 10.
Responsibilities
The Distinguished Engineer role extends the Staff Frontend Engineer and the Staff Backend Engineer roles as the individual equivalent of a Director, Engineering.
- At this level the person’s contribution plays to their strength and role on the team. These contributions come in different forms such as: Ship large feature sets with team, completes feature discovery independently, publishes technical blogs and speaks at conferences, interfaces with customers and provides technical direction to stakeholders (Product, Sales, others)
- Generate technical and process improvements
- Contribute to the sense of psychological safety on your team
- Work cross-departmentally
- Be a technical mentor for other backend engineers
- Author architecture documents for epics
- Hold team members accountable within their roles
Senior Director, Development
The Senior Director, Development role extends the Director, Development role. This role is defined by the functional area(s) the person manages.
Job Grade
The Senior Director, Development is a grade 11.
Responsibilities
- Organizational credibility: Past experience in managing an entire functional area of Engineering
- Prioritization of hiring efforts to focus on areas of most need and quickly recruit top engineering talent
- Motivate and communicate across multiple levels of their department
- Have successful peer partnerships with other department leaders in Engineering, and cross-functionally (Product Management, sales, marketing, alliances, etc)
- Provide a consistent/successful interface between Engineering Development and Product Management
- Development, measurement, and management of key metrics for functional area’s performance
- Drive high throughput
- Standardize the development process where needed, allow local differences where advantages
- Help shift the organization toward CD over time
Engineering Fellow
The Engineering Fellow role extends the Distinguished Engineer role and is the individual contributor equivalent of a VP of Engineering.
Job Grade
The Engineering Fellow is a grade 12.
Responsibilities
- Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance that impact all of Engineering at GitLab.
- Solve technical problems of the highest scope and complexity for the entire
organization.
- Exert significant influence on the overall objectives and long-range goals of GitLab.
- Ensure that our standards for style, maintainability, and best practices are suitable for the unique problems of scale and diversity of use represented by the GitLab product. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.
- Drive innovation across Engineering with a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of immense complexity and scope.
- Actively seek out and prioritize our toughest technical challenges with a goal of creating significant improvement for GitLab’s use, ease of development, and/or technical efficiency.
- Represent GitLab and its values in public communication in all aspects of our software development lifecycle and public relations. Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for critical projects and aspects of our technical architecture.
- Provide mentorship for Senior and Staff Engineers at the company to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and to share your great expertise across the organization.
- Confidently ship immense or otherwise extremely high-impact features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other members of the organization.
- Help create the sense of psychological safety in the department
VP of Development
Job Grade
The VP of Development is a grade 12. This role extends the Senior Director, Development role. It expands the role to cover full functional and product capabilities at GitLab.
Responsibilities
- Drive recruiting of a world class team at all levels
- Help their (senior) directors, senior managers, managers, and engineers grow their skills and experience
- Measure and improve the happiness of Engineering
- Make sure the handbook is used and maintained in a transparent way
- Implement technical and process improvements that are causal to most critical needs
- Participate and support a sense of psychological safety of the department
- Drive quarterly OKRs around company goals
- Define the agile project management process
- Be accountable for product quality, security, and performance
- Work across departments within engineering
- Work closely with Senior leaders of Product Management to provide a consistent/successful interface between Engineering Development and Product Management
- Support constantly changing priorities between product features, availability, performance, security and reliability
- Support process for incident management including quality control of RCAs
Hiring Process
Candidates for this position can generally expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Note that as candidates indicate preference or aptitude for one or more specialties, the hiring process will be adjusted to suit. 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.
- Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Technical Recruiters
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute first interview with a Director of Engineering
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute second peer interview with an Engineering Manager
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute third interview with another member of the Engineering team
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fourth interview with a member of the Product team
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fifth interview with our VP of Engineering
- Finally, candidates may be asked to schedule a 50 minute final interview with our CEO
- Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email
Executive VP of Engineering
Job Grade
The Chief Technology Officer is a grade 12.
- Drive recruiting of a world class team
- Help their directors, senior managers, managers, and engineers grow their skills and experience
- Measure and improve the happiness of Engineering
- Make sure the handbook is used and maintained in a transparent way
- Sponsor technical and process improvements
- Own the sense of psychological safety of the department
- Set quarterly OKRs around company goals
- Define the agile project management process
- Spend time with customers to understand their needs and issues
- Be accountable for product quality, security, and performance
Hiring Process
Candidates for this position can generally expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Note that as candidates indicate preference or aptitude for one or more specialties, the hiring process will be adjusted to suit. 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.
- Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Technical Recruiters
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute first interview with a Director of Engineering
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute second peer interview with an Engineering Manager
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute third interview with another member of the Engineering team
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fourth interview with a member of the Product team
- Next, candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fifth interview with our VP of Engineering
- Finally, candidates may be asked to schedule a 50 minute final interview with our CEO
- Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email
Career Ladder
For more details on the engineering career ladders, please review the engineering career development handbook page.
Directors in Engineering 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. Directors will often be given ambiguous ill-defined problems with the implicit goal of gaining clarity and driving execution/direction.
Distinguished Engineer Roles at GitLab Distinguished Engineers are recognized experts in multiple technology domains within GitLab, and represent the senior technical leadership within their organization and throughout the company at large. They are responsible for helping shape the future direction of the organization, assisting management establish strategic roadmaps, and driving priorities to meet objectives. They also have a strong track record of growing and influencing others, working with all levels of senior leadership, and fostering the psychological safety and happiness of members of their team.
Engineering Fellow See Engineering Felow.
The Engineering Manager specializes in 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.
Principal Engineer Roles at GitLab Principal Engineers are recognized experts in multiple technology domains relevant to GitLab, and represent the senior technical leadership within their organization. They are responsible for driving the direction of their part of the organization, assisting management and other senior technical leaders create strategic roadmaps, and driving priorities to meet various objectives. This role reports to Senior Manager and above.
Job Grade The Principal Engineer is a grade 9.
Directors in Engineering 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. Senior Directors will often be given ambiguous ill-defined problems with the implicit goal of gaining clarity and driving execution/direction.
Senior Distinguished Engineer Roles at GitLab Senior Distinguished Engineers are recognized experts in multiple technology domains relevant to GitLab, and represent the senior technical leadership within their organization and throughout the company at large. They are responsible for helping shape the future direction of the organization, assisting management establish strategic roadmaps, driving priorities to meet objectives, and make scalable and sustainable architectural decisions of strategic projects. They also have a strong track record of growing and influencing others, working with all levels of senior and executive leadership, and fostering the psychological safety and happiness of members of their team.
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. Engineering Leadership at GitLab is cross-discipline.
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. Engineering Leadership at GitLab is cross-discipline.
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:
- Mission: Everyone can contribute
- Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
- Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
- Transparency: Over 2,000 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
- Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
- Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity,
Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
- Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
- Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
- Work/Life Harmony: Flexible workday, Family and Friends days
- 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.
