Incubation Engineering Leadership

The Incubation Engineering Leadership manage the Incubation Engineering Department. The team members in this department focus on long-term trends and features that are too early to measure via usage or revenue, but are critical to the long term growth and success of GitLab. The projects this department works on align with the “new markets” investment type. Long term, the budget for this area will be ~10% of R&D.

Levels

Director, Incubation Engineering

*The Director, Incubation Engineering reports to the VP of Incubation Engineering.

Director, Incubation Engineering Job Grade

The Director, Incubation Engineering is a grade 10.

Director, Incubation Engineering Responsibilities

• Manage and help set the direction for 4-6 Incubation Engineers across a range of domains
• Recruit top talent to build a best-in-class Incubation Engineering Department; responsible for hiring and capacity planning
• Develop strategies to support scaling beyond the Incubation phase and advise on the project lifecycle for their team
• Collaborate with Engineering peers and company executives on key innovation initiatives
• Provide transparent status to stakeholders
• Support SEGs by validating and debating approaches to test ideas
• Serve as champion of the Incubation department and the work that the engineers engage in
• Stay abreast of long term technical trends in the market
• Stay informed about other products’ functionality and positioning
• Advocate for broad changes in the GitLab project to stay ahead of scalability and performance bottlenecks

Director, Incubation Engineering Requirements

• Demonstrated success in leading teams of engineers or other technical experts in a fast moving, high growth environment
• Experience scaling products without compromising on security
• Broad knowledge of technology trends with a focus on managing innovation / incubation / accelerator teams
• Diplomatic communication skills with the ability to utilise storytelling and narration to evangelize the Incubation Engineering Department’s story Experience in a variety of stages of the startup lifecycle, from inception to launch

VP of Incubation Engineering

*The VP of Incubation Engineering reports to the Chief Technology Officer.

VP of Incubation Engineering Job Grade

The VP of Incubation Engineering is a grade 12.

VP of Incubation Engineering Responsibilities

• Recruit excellent senior individual contributors to act as Single-engineering Groups (SEGs)
• Effectively wield technical influence within a larger company and codebase
• Provide lightweight project management to the Single-Engineer Groups under their purview
• Provide transparent status to stakeholders
• Stay abreast of long term technical trends in the market
• Stay informed about other products’ functionality and positioning
• Advocate for broad changes in the GitLab project to stay ahead of scalability and performance bottlenecks

VP of Incubation Engineering Requirements

• Able to enable people to go from 0 to 1: get something shipped
• Maintain the prioritized, justified list of future investment opportunities
• Learn, live, and teach our core values
• Be technically credible (at the VP level)
• Be an excellent recruiter of engineering talent
• Have a defined management philosophy
• Excellent verbal & written (async) communication skills
• Demonstrated longevity and perseverance at a fast-growing organization
• Be effective in an all-remote setting
• Humility

VP of Incubation Engineering Nice-to-haves

We’d like the successful candidate to have at least a simple majority of the following attributes:

• Extensive familiarity with the GitLab project and application
• Prior success at startup or entrepreneurial organizations
• Experience at multiple product-oriented technology companies
• Experience growing a company to massive scale
• Prior developer platform or tool industry experience
• Experience working with people around the globe
• Extensive open-source work
• Demonstrate curiosity for new topics and domains

Performance Indicators

• Community Contribution rate
• Hiring Actual vs Plan
• Team MR Rate
• Team Marketing activities

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.

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