Principal Engineer

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.

Responsibilities

Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.

• Collaborates and makes proposals across several teams on their engineering work, and helps their team members make informed decisions in alignment with the sub-department strategic plans.
• Proactively identifies opportunities to reuse or generalize existing services and product features. Avoids duplication of effort by encouraging collaboration.
• Exposes technology and organizational needs throughout their department.
• Teach, mentor, grow, and provide advice to other domain experts, individual contributors, across several teams in their sub-department.
• Play a central role in technical, business, and organizational contributions affecting the sub-department/department.
• Plan improvements and features with a 6 month view.
• Solves technical problems of the highest scope, complexity, and ambiguity for their sub-department.
• Interfaces with EMs and Senior Manager or above and enables Staff Engineers to engage on department-level aspects of larger (sub-department wide) initiatives.
• Looks for innovation opportunities between several teams with a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of large complexity and scope.
• Proposes initial technical implementation which supports architectural changes that solve scaling and performance problems.
• Ensures that OKR level goals are aligned across several teams in their sub-department.
• Guides conversations to remove blockers and encourage collaboration across teams.
• Provides a point of escalation for sub-department teams facing complex technical challenges.
• Attain a measurable impact on the work of sub-department teams.
• Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your sub-department.
• Exposes the work of the sub department and their business impact internally.
• Knowledgeable in all specialities practiced within the Department or Sub Department
• Participate in either Tier 2 or Tier 3 weekday and weekend and occasional night on-call rotations to assist troubleshooting product operations, security operations, and urgent engineering issues OR 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.
• Complete Interview Training in support of hiring efforts for the department. Participation as either a technical interviewer or part of their team’s interview panel may be expected from hiring managers, given ongoing hiring needs.

Career Ladder

For more details on the engineering career ladders, please review the engineering career development handbook page.

 

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About GitLab

GitLab is an open core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating the rate of human progress. This mission is integral to our culture, influencing how we hire, build products, and lead our industry. We make this possible at GitLab by running our operations on our product and staying aligned with our values. Learn more about Life at GitLab. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise, and Duo Workflow, customers get the benefit of AI at every stage of the SDLC. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier. All team members are encouraged and expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact across our global organisation.

See our culture page for more!

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