Senior Engineering Manager, Non-Linear Productivity

Details

GitLab is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to build and lead a small, high-autonomy team focused on identifying and fixing high-leverage friction points in GitLab's software development lifecycle. This is a 0-to-1 team-building mandate involving the recruitment of four engineers and a three-month pilot measured through system-level metrics such as merge request pipeline rate (MRPM), pipeline success rate, and pipeline latency.

The role reports to a VP-level engineering leader and requires close collaboration with engineering managers, affected engineering teams, and leadership. The manager will define the pilot's operating model, establish technical direction, lead root-cause investigations, implement durable fixes, and determine whether the pilot should graduate into a permanent function.

Responsibilities

Vision and Strategy

• Define and continuously refine the operating model for the non-linear productivity pilot.
• Establish how engineering friction is diagnosed and how fixes are prioritized against MRPM, pipeline success rate, and pipeline latency.
• Identify high-impact productivity opportunities across the software development lifecycle, including flaky tests, review latency, pipeline reliability, tooling gaps, and context loss for human and agentic contributors.
• Translate the broad mandate into a time-boxed roadmap with defined milestones for a three-month pilot.

Team Building and Leadership

• Source, evaluate, and select four exceptional engineers for the pilot squad.
• Negotiate 100% or partial allocation models with engineers' current engineering managers.
• Set the team's technical direction, working norms, decision-making processes, and reporting practices.
• Mentor engineers in root-cause diagnosis and shift-left engineering practices.

Technical Exploration and Experimentation

• Lead hands-on investigation to instrument and baseline MRPM, pipeline success rate, and pipeline latency.
• Diagnose high-leverage friction points and validate hypotheses with real data.
• Design and implement compounding fixes, including shift-left quality improvements, tooling investments, and improved context and interfaces for human and AI agents.
• Review architecture, investigate pipeline internals, and unblock the team on difficult technical problems.

Internal Adoption and Productivity

• Own high-impact friction areas from diagnosis through implementation and measurable metric improvement.
• Work with affected engineering teams to ensure fixes are trusted, adopted, and maintained.
• Track and report metric movement honestly, including unsuccessful initiatives.
• Document reusable patterns and playbooks for organization-wide adoption.

Operations, Risk, and Enablement

• Establish an impact-reporting cadence for engineering managers and leadership.
• Ensure fixes degrade gracefully and do not introduce reliability risks into CI/CD systems.
• Help define the criteria for graduating the pilot into a permanent function and build the case based on results.

Requirements

• Track record leading small, high-autonomy engineering teams, ideally in developer productivity, CI/CD, platform, or infrastructure reliability.
• Experience measuring engineering work through system-level outcomes rather than feature delivery.
• Deep familiarity with CI/CD and build systems, including pipeline flakiness, performance, success rates, and latency.
• Demonstrated root-cause analysis skills and a strong focus on engineering talent and quality.
• Comfort with metrics-driven accountability, including establishing baselines and reporting results transparently.
• Strong executive-level communication skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience with agentic or AI-assisted development workflows.
• Experience running a defined-window pilot or 0-to-1 initiative with explicit success criteria.
• Familiarity with GitLab CI/CD internals or equivalent experience with a large-scale build and test system.

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.

GitLab roles are remote, subject to location-based eligibility requirements. The listed salary range applies to residents of the United States and excludes bonuses, equity, and benefits. GitLab is an equal opportunity workplace.