Director of Engineering, Database Excellence

Details

GitLab is seeking a Director of Engineering, Database Excellence, to lead the Database Excellence stage and report to the Vice President of Data Engineering. The role sets the direction for databases supporting GitLab.com, self-managed GitLab, and GitLab Dedicated. The organization owns the reliability, capacity, health, and sustainability of GitLab's application datastores, with PostgreSQL as the primary focus alongside Redis, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, and object storage.

The role is accountable for database capacity and availability on GitLab.com and involves long-range platform decisions in partnership with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps. Key initiatives include reducing infrastructure costs, improving data growth controls and saturation detection, standardizing database services, rebuilding the self-managed upgrade experience, and contributing to GitLab's company-wide datastore strategy, including Cells partitioning.

Responsibilities

• Set direction and long-range plans for the database platform in line with company strategy.
• Own database capacity and availability outcomes for GitLab.com and communicate database risk to senior leadership.
• Lead and coach three Engineering Managers and develop Staff-plus engineers into leaders.
• Drive cross-division technical decisions using data, partnering with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps.
• Partner with Product to prioritize database platform investments and make infrastructure tradeoffs in the context of product outcomes.
• Own the hiring plan, organization design, retention, and performance management for teams across regions.
• Set quarterly objectives and key results and engineering key performance indicators for the stage.
• Manage the database infrastructure budget with FinOps.
• Serve as an escalation point for database incidents, standardize effective processes, and keep the handbook current.

Requirements

• Experience leading managers of managers, including coaching newer managers.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL at scale, including capacity planning, upgrades, replication, performance, and large production clusters.
• Experience using data to make strategic technical decisions and connect database platform investments and tradeoffs with product outcomes.
• Experience supporting software that customers run themselves or working through self-managed upgrade challenges.
• Experience leading backend engineering teams that own production infrastructure.
• Experience applying site reliability engineering practices, including service level objectives, on-call operations, incident management, cost management, and automation.
• Experience communicating clearly in writing in an asynchronous, handbook-first company.
• Experience leading globally distributed remote teams.
• Experience with Redis, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, object storage, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, managed database services, FinOps, AI-assisted engineering workflows, or platform and infrastructure organizations is a plus.

Team

Database Excellence includes Database Architecture, Database Automation, and Self Managed Database, led by three Engineering Managers alongside an Operations Manager. The teams work across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India. Database Architecture provides datastore guidance, data growth controls, and the database review process. Database Automation builds PostgreSQL fleet automation, upgrades, provisioning, health monitoring, and an internal managed PostgreSQL offering. Self Managed Database is rebuilding the upgrade and migration experience for self-managed GitLab.

Benefits

• Benefits supporting health, finances, and well-being.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Team Member Resource Groups.
• Equity compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• Growth and Development Fund.
• Parental leave.

All GitLab roles are remote, although some roles may have specific location-based eligibility requirements. GitLab is an equal opportunity workplace and provides reasonable accommodations during the recruiting process.