Director of Engineering, Workflows & Runners

About the Role

We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the teams building the core primitives for Workflows and Function Runtime at GitLab. You will own the strategy, architecture, and delivery of scalable, multi-tenant, and cost-efficient distributed systems that become shared infrastructure for many product groups across GitLab.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll work directly with senior and principal engineers on design and technical decisions, while also building and scaling a high-performing, values-aligned engineering organization.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical vision and roadmap for GitLab’s core Workflow and Function Runtime primitives, in partnership with Product, Architecture, and other platform teams.
• Lead and grow multiple engineering teams responsible for highly available, horizontally scalable, and secure distributed systems used across GitLab.
• Be hands-on with architecture and code: review designs, dive into incidents, and contribute to critical paths where needed.
• Drive operational excellence for these shared services, including SLOs, on-call, incident response, capacity planning, and resilience across regions and tenants.
• Optimize for cost and efficiency at scale, balancing performance, reliability, and unit economics for long-running and bursty workloads.
• Define and mature platform APIs and abstractions that allow product teams to compose workflows, schedule functions, and integrate with the runtime safely and predictably.
• Create a strong engineering culture focused on results, iteration, ownership, and rigorous technical judgment.
• Collaborate across the company (Product Management, Security, Infrastructure, Data, AI/ML, and other stage groups) to ensure the platform primitives meet the needs of diverse workloads.
• Recruit, develop, and retain senior and staff-level engineers and managers; provide clear expectations, feedback, and growth paths.
• Champion GitLab values (results, transparency, efficiency, collaboration, diversity & inclusion) in how the team plans, executes, and communicates.

What You’ll Bring

• Proven experience leading teams building core platform or infrastructure services (e.g., workflow engines, function runtimes, control planes, high-scale microservices, or similar distributed systems).
• Track record as a hands-on engineering leader: you’ve meaningfully contributed to architecture and design, and you are comfortable reading/writing code to unblock or clarify.
• Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, including topics such as service decomposition, data partitioning, fault tolerance, and backpressure.
• Demonstrated success operating mission-critical services in production (SLOs, on-call, incident management, postmortems, capacity management, chaos/DR testing).
• Experience driving cost efficiency in cloud-native environments (profiling, performance tuning, right-sizing, storage and network optimization, and thoughtful use of managed services).
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), and event-driven/async architectures; experience with function-as-a-service or serverless runtimes is a plus.
• People leadership experience managing managers and senior/staff engineers, with a record of hiring, coaching, and building inclusive, high-trust teams.
• Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization, with excellent written and asynchronous communication skills.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4–6+ years in engineering leadership (multi-team or org-level scope).

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 bonus

es, 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$230,000—$285,000 USDHow GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

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.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.

Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.

GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.