Director of Engineering, Organizations & Cells

<div class="content-intro"><p>GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.</p> <p>The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values&nbsp;and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZIb5zszQI">Co-create the future with us</a> as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.</p> <p>*<em>Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.</em></p></div><p><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>Overview of the Role</strong></span></p> <p>GitLab.com is being rebuilt as a horizontally scalable cluster. Two primitives make that possible:&nbsp;<strong>Organizations</strong>, the tenant boundary that makes a customer's data a single addressable, portable unit, and <strong>Cells</strong>, independent GitLab instances that host those Organizations and can be provisioned on demand across clouds and regions.</p> <p>The target is a 100x increase in headroom for GitLab.com, delivered without customers ever seeing a cell. Same domain, same URLs, same product — a substrate underneath that scales by adding capacity rather than by negotiating with a single database.</p> <p>The boundary we are building is worth more than the scale it unlocks. An isolated Organization can guarantee where its data lives and what travels with it. That turns data residency, regional control, in-region AI and search compute, and enforceable tenant-level policy into product capabilities rather than deployment exceptions. It is the foundation for a class of enterprise and regulated-market offerings that a shared-instance architecture cannot support.</p> <p>We are hiring a Director of Engineering in India to lead this charter. You will build and run the engineering organization that takes Cells from first production migrations to the default way GitLab.com operates.</p> <h2><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><strong>What you will do</strong></span></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Delivery of the Cells and Organizations roadmap</strong> — cell provisioning and lifecycle, the routing and topology layer, organization data migration tooling, and feature parity across the platform.</li> <li><strong>Migration execution.</strong> Cohort-based movement of customer Organizations onto cells with zero data loss, verified rollback, and no downtime outside the tenant in flight.</li> <li><strong>A multi-cloud, multi-region cell footprint</strong> and the architectural decisions that govern what stays cell-local and what crosses boundaries.</li> <li><strong>The engineering organization.</strong> Hire, level, and develop managers and senior ICs across several teams. Set the technical bar and the operating cadence.</li> <li><strong>Cross-functional leadership.</strong> This charter touches nearly every product group at GitLab. You will drive commitments and sequencing with peer engineering leaders, Product, Infrastructure, and Security — much of it asynchronously, across time zones, in public issues and merge requests.</li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>How success is measured</strong></span></h2> <ul> <li>Customer Organizations running on cells in production, migrated cleanly and on schedule.</li> <li>Availability and latency improvements attributable to isolation and load distribution.</li> <li>Infrastructure cost per unit of capacity trending down as the footprint grows.</li> <li>Throughput and retention of the teams you build.</li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-size: 14pt;">What you will bring</span></h2> <p><strong>Engineering leadership at director scale</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience leading multiple teams through managers (roughly 25–60 engineers), including hiring and developing managers.</li> <li>A track record of shipping multi-quarter infrastructure programs with hard external dependencies — the kind where the hardest problem is sequencing across ten teams, not writing the code.</li> <li>Comfort operating as a peer to VPs and staff-plus engineers: you can hold an architectural position on technical merit and change it when the evidence changes.</li> <li>Strong written communication. GitLab is remote and asynchronous by default; influence here is exercised in documents.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Distributed systems depth</strong></p> <ul> <li>You have built and operated large-scale distributed systems in production — multi-tenant SaaS, sharded or cell-based architectures, control planes, or data platforms at comparable scale.</li> <li>Working fluency in relational database scaling (partitioning, sharding, replication), data migration at scale, and request routing.</li> <li>Real operational experience: incident command, capacity planning, and designing for blast-radius containment.</li> <li>Cloud infrastructure at depth on at least one major provider, ideally more than one.</li> </ul> <p><strong>AI-native engineering</strong></p> <ul> <li>You understand what agentic access patterns do to a platform's read volume, concurrency, and authorization model, and you design for that rather than retrofitting it.</li> <li>You use AI tooling in your own engineering practice and have raised the bar for it across a team.</li> </ul><div class="content-conclusion"><h4><strong>How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees</strong></h4> <ul> <li><a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/benefits/general-and-entity-benefits/">Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/time-off-and-absence/time-off-types/#flexible-paid-time-off-pto">Flexible Paid Time Off&nbsp;</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/inclusion/tmrg-tmag/">Team Member Resource Groups</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/stock-options/">Equity Compensation &amp; Employee Stock Purchase Plan</a></li> <li><a href="https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/learning-and-development/growth-and-development/">Growth