Senior Engineering Manager

Engineering Managers at GitLab see their team as their product. While they are technically credible and know the details of what engineers work on, their time is spent safeguarding their team's health, hiring a world-class team, and putting them in the best position to succeed. They own the delivery of product commitments and are always looking to improve productivity. They must also coordinate across departments to accomplish collaborative goals. Engineering Leadership at GitLab is cross-discipline. Senior Engineering Managers may or may not manage engineering managers in their role but they must be capable of managing Backend Engineering Managers, Frontend Engineering Managers,
and Fullstack Engineering Managers.

Responsibilities

• Hire and build a globally-distributed, happy, and successful team
• Plan and execute long term strategies that benefit your team and the product stage(s)
• Understand Engineering KPIs and seek to improve them
• Lead and drive significant results for multiple teams. Examples include, but are not limited to:
  • Managing 3 or more engineering teams with at least three engineering manager direct reports.
  • Managing two or more engineering teams with individual contributor direct reports.
  • Leading business critical cross-functional initiatives in addition to managing a team.
• Conduct managerial interviews for candidates, and train engineering managers to do managerial interviews
• Generate and implement process improvements, especially cross-team processes
• Hold regular 1:1s with team members and skip-level 1:1s with indirect reports
• Provide management mentorship
• Enable quad planning team collaboration within product groups
• Enable Product, Quality, and UX performance via solid stable-counterpart partnership
• Contribute to the sense of psychological safety of multiple teams.
• Give regular and clear feedback around the individual's performance
• Draft quarterly OKRs and Engineering KPIs
• Improve product quality, security, and performance
• Participate in the Incident Management on-call rotation to help ensure the availability goals for GitLab.com are met, by working with reliability engineers and development team members

Requirements

• Exquisite brokering skills: regularly achieve consensus amongst stakeholders
• Collaborate effectively with others
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values
• Build teams that excel through our values
• Technical credibility: Past experience as a product engineer and leading teams thereof
• Management credibility: Significant past experience as an engineering manager
• Ability to understand, communicate and improve the quality of multiple teams
• Demonstrate longevity at at least one recent job
• Ability to be successful managing at a remote-only company
• Demonstrated successful partnership with stable counterparts
• Exemplify diversity, inclusion, and belonging in leadership
• Humble, servant leader
• Ability to use GitLab

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in a peak performance organization
• Enterprise software company experience
• Computer science education or equivalent experience
• Passionate about open source and developer tools
• Experience contributing to open source software
• Experience working with modern frontend frameworks (for example React, Vue.js)
• Working knowledge of Ruby on Rails and/or Golang
• Domain knowledge relevant to the product stage in which you are looking to join (for example someone with CI/CD experience applying for the Verify and Release team)
• Be a user of GitLab, or familiar with our company
• Prior Developer Platform or Tool industry experience
• Prior high-growth startup experience
• Experience working on systems at massive, consumer scale
• Deep open source experience
• Experience working with global teams
• Be inquisitive: Ask great questions

Job Grade

The Senior Engineering Manager is a grade 9.

Performance Indicators

• Development Hiring Actual vs. Plan
• Team/Group MR Rate
• Development Handbook Update Frequency

Career Ladder

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can generally expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Note that as candidates indicate preference or aptitude for one or more specialties, the hiring process will be adjusted to suit. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find their job title on our team page.

1. Selected candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Technical Recruiters
2. Candidates will be invited to schedule a 60 minute first interview with a VP of Development
3. Candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute second interview with a Director of Engineering
4. Candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute third interview with another member of the Engineering team
5. Candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fourth interview with a member of the Product team
6. Candidates will be invited to schedule a 45 minute fifth interview with a VP of Engineering
7. Candidates may be asked to schedule a 50 minute final interview with our CEO
8. Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer via email

Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

Compensation Calculator

About GitLab

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.

We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.

Top 10 Reasons to Work for GitLab:

1. Mission: Everyone can contribute
2. Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
3. Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
4. Transparency: Over 2,000 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
5. Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
6. Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity, Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
7. Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
8. Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
9. Work/Life Harmony: Flexible workday, Family and Friends days
10. Remote Done Right: One of the world's largest all-remote companies, prolific inventor of remote best practices

See our culture page for more!