Incubation Engineering Leadership

The Incubation Engineering Leadership manage the Incubation Engineering Department. The team members in this department focus on long-term trends and features that are too early to measure via usage or revenue, but are critical to the long term growth and success of GitLab. The projects this department works on align with the "new markets" investment type. Long term, the budget for this area will be ~10% of R&D.

On this page

• Levels
  • Director, Incubation Engineering
    • Director, Incubation Engineering Job Grade
    • Director, Incubation Engineering Responsibilities
    • Director, Incubation Engineering Requirements
  • VP of Incubation Engineering
    • VP of Incubation Engineering Job Grade
    • VP of Incubation Engineering Responsibilities
    • VP of Incubation Engineering Requirements
    • VP of Incubation Engineering Nice-to-haves
• Performance Indicators
• Career Ladder

Levels

Director, Incubation Engineering

*The Director, Incubation Engineering reports to the VP of Incubation Engineering.

Director, Incubation Engineering Job Grade

The Director, Incubation Engineering is a grade 10.

Director, Incubation Engineering Responsibilities

• Manage and help set the direction for 4-6 Incubation Engineers across a range of domains
• Recruit top talent to build a best-in-class Incubation Engineering Department; responsible for hiring and capacity planning
• Develop strategies to support scaling beyond the Incubation phase and advise on the project lifecycle for their team
• Collaborate with Engineering peers and company executives on key innovation initiatives
• Provide transparent status to stakeholders
• Support SEGs by validating and debating approaches to test ideas
• Serve as champion of the Incubation department and the work that the engineers engage in
• Stay abreast of long term technical trends in the market
• Stay informed about other products' functionality and positioning
• Advocate for broad changes in the GitLab project to stay ahead of scalability and performance bottlenecks

Director, Incubation Engineering Requirements

• Demonstrated success in leading teams of engineers or other technical experts in a fast moving, high growth environment
• Experience scaling products without compromising on security
• Broad knowledge of technology trends with a focus on managing innovation / incubation / accelerator teams
• Diplomatic communication skills with the ability to utilise storytelling and narration to evangelize the Incubation Engineering Department’s story Experience in a variety of stages of the startup lifecycle, from inception to launch

VP of Incubation Engineering

*The VP of Incubation Engineering reports to the Chief Technology Officer.

VP of Incubation Engineering Job Grade

The VP of Incubation Engineering is a grade 12.

VP of Incubation Engineering Responsibilities

• Recruit excellent senior individual contributors to act as Single-engineering Groups (SEGs)
• Effectively wield technical influence within a larger company and codebase
• Provide lightweight project management to the Single-Engineer Groups under their purview
• Provide transparent status to stakeholders
• Stay abreast of long term technical trends in the market
• Stay informed about other products' functionality and positioning
• Advocate for broad changes in the GitLab project to stay ahead of scalability and performance bottlenecks

VP of Incubation Engineering Requirements

• Able to enable people to go from 0 to 1: get something shipped
• Maintain the prioritized, justified list of future investment opportunities
• Learn, live, and teach our core values
• Be technically credible (at the VP level)
• Be an excellent recruiter of engineering talent
• Have a defined management philosophy
• Excellent verbal & written (async) communication skills
• Demonstrated longevity and perseverance at a fast-growing organization
• Be effective in an all-remote setting
• Humility

VP of Incubation Engineering Nice-to-haves

We'd like the successful candidate to have at least a simple majority of the following attributes:

• Extensive familiarity with the GitLab project and application
• Prior success at startup or entrepreneurial organizations
• Experience at multiple product-oriented technology companies
• Experience growing a company to massive scale
• Prior developer platform or tool industry experience
• Experience working with people around the globe
• Extensive open-source work
• Demonstrate curiosity for new topics and domains

Performance Indicators

• Community Contribution rate
• Hiring Actual vs Plan
• Team MR Rate
• Team Marketing activities

Career Ladder

For more details on the engineering career ladders, please review the engineering career development handbook page.

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!