Senior Director, Production and Tenant Platform Engineering

Remote, Canada; Remote, US

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.

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 and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

*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.

An overview of this role

As the Senior Director of Production and Tenant Platform Engineering, you will lead the foundational engineering teams responsible for the reliability, scalability, and lifecycle of the GitLab platform. This role brings together two critical domains: the "Tenant Experience" (the operator and customer facing platform surfaces) and the "Production Engineering" pillars (the underlying infrastructure that powers GitLab.com and our self-managed offerings).

You will lead a high-performing organization of managers and engineers who own the entire stack, from network infrastructure, fleet management, and cloud cost efficiency to observability, tenant controls, and the upgrade lifecycle. Your mission is to evolve GitLab’s platform architecture to support massive scale across SaaS, Dedicated, and self-managed environments, ensuring that whether a customer runs in the cloud or on-prem, they experience a platform that is reliable, performant, and easy to operate.

This is a high-impact leadership role. You’ll define the strategy for how GitLab remains resilient, manage critical production incidents, drive cloud efficiency, and build the abstractions that allow modular services (like AI Gateway, ClickHouse, and OpenBao) to ship and scale with confidence. You will succeed by cultivating a culture of operational excellence, simplifying complex technical architectures, and ensuring your organization operates with clarity and alignment in a high-growth environment.

What you'll do

  • Lead a Unified Platform Strategy: Define and execute a cohesive roadmap that aligns Production Engineering (Fleet, Network, Cost, Responder) with Tenant Experience (Observability, Controls, Upgrade Tooling). Ensure these investments connect cleanly to support GitLab’s multi-tenant and self-managed reality.
  • Drive Operational Excellence & Reliability: Maintain deep accountability for GitLab’s production outcomes. You will oversee incident management, alert efficacy, and service-level reliability, ensuring that both GitLab.com and our global customer base benefit from a stable, high-performance platform.
  • Scale Engineering Leadership: Manage a senior management team, coaching them on performance, hiring, team structure, and execution. You will create the organizational conditions for success—defining clear mandates, removing blockers, and fostering a culture of ownership and accountability.
  • Evolve the Platform Architecture: Guide the technical evolution of the platform. This includes optimizing fleet management and cloud utilization, maturing our observability and self-healing frameworks, and delivering a modern upgrade experience that bridges the gap between legacy Omnibus and modern Kubernetes/cloud-native models.
  • Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Engineering Directors, Product Leaders, and Reliability/Delivery teams to ensure platform investments align with business priorities (e.g., AI roadmap, cost goals, deployment speed).
  • Translate Strategy into Execution: Convert broad organizational goals into actionable roadmaps. You will make tough trade-off decisions between immediate production stability and long-term architectural health, ensuring the team remains focused on outcomes that drive business value.
  • Build the Future of GitLab Operations: Champion initiatives that reduce operational toil, improve the developer/operator experience, and standardise platform interfaces across our modular service architecture.

What you'll bring

  • Executive Engineering Leadership: Proven experience leading large, distributed engineering organizations (managing managers) within complex, high-scale platform environments.
  • Deep Production Expertise: A track record of owning critical production systems. You understand the realities of running distributed systems at scale, including incident response, traffic management, capacity planning, and cloud infrastructure costs.
  • Platform Engineering Acumen: Deep familiarity with large-scale distributed systems, along with various delivery models including containerized and Kubernetes-based platforms, infrastructure-as-code, and the operational challenges of supporting multi-tenant SaaS alongside diverse self-managed (Omnibus/OAK) deployments.
  • Strategic Architectural Judgment: Ability to evaluate complex technical trade-offs—such as build vs. buy, cloud-first vs. on-prem constraints, and architectural patterns for modular services—and provide clear, defensible direction.
  • Change Management: Experience leading teams through periods of significant growth, organizational change, or technical pivot (e.g., modernizing a monolith or scaling infrastructure for new product lines).
  • Commitment to GitLab Values: Strong alignment with our values of ownership, speed with quality, and customer outcomes.
  • Operational Focus: A proven ability to raise the bar on production quality. You have successfully led initiatives that measurably improved system reliability, reduced toil, or optimized infrastructure efficiency.

About the team

The Production and Tenant Platform team sits at the core of GitLab’s Infrastructure Platforms organization. We own the "how" of GitLab—how it runs, how it scales, and how it is managed by operators and customers alike. Our scope is broad: we manage the network edge, the underlying cloud compute fleet, and the cost efficiency of our services; we provide the observability signals that detect issues; we define the tenant controls (rate limits, feature flags) that protect our system; and we build the upgrade tools that make GitLab’s release cycle sustainable.

We work across all GitLab environments (GitLab.com, Dedicated, and self-managed) to deliver a unified, coherent platform. We are a team of problem-solvers who value transparency and autonomy, and we partner closely with Delivery, Dedicated, and Product teams to ensure the infrastructure isn't just reliable, but that it is the primary engine of GitLab's growth and customer success.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range

$168,000 - $285,600 USD

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Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

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