GitLab is building an open source, single application for the entire software development lifecycle—from project planning and source code management to CI/CD, monitoring, and security.
Right now, we’re in a period of growth, we’re quickly increasing the size of the Support team, in step with the number of GitLab employees.
At GitLab, we live and breathe open source principles. This means our entire handbook is online, and with a few clicks, you can find the details of future releases, check out our past releases, and see some of the customers you’d be supporting while working here.
Support Engineering Management at GitLab isn’t your typical management opportunity because of our approach to the function. Support is embedded within the Engineering department and truly operates in an environment where Support and Engineering meet. Your team will be interacting with customers daily as they encounter the difficult edge cases of running GitLab in complex environments.
In the space of a day, our engineers might be doing behind the scenes work of a Linux administrator troubleshooting performance problems by using strace on a particular process, interacting with the Product team to ensure that steps in a bug report are reproducible, or with the Engineering team itself diving deep into our codebase and putting together a merge request to actually fix a customer issue. That’s not all though - they’d equally be invited to improve our documentation, help build out more efficient support processes in our issue tracker and dive into the cutting edge technologies that will define how we will do work tomorrow.
At GitLab, we hold that managers should be technically competent and experienced in the subject matter. So, it would be your job to use your technical expertise to support all of those moving pieces - including stepping into the shoes of a Support Engineer when needs be.
We want to live in a world where everyone can contribute, and as a member of the support team there are no barriers to using your skills to improve the experience of our users, our customers and importantly the folks you’d be supporting as a manager.
The Manager, Support Engineering is a grade 8.
As a Manager, Support Engineering, you will be:
For more details, see our Support Manager Responsibilities page.
Support Managers also work on things that will make your (and the lives of your coworkers) easier. Current and past Support team members have:
Senior Support Managers manage multiple teams and Staff-level individual contributors (ICs) within the Customer Support Department. As a Senior Manager, Support Engineering you will ensure that the managers and/or ICs who report to you, and the engineers they work with have everything they need to deliver world-class support to GitLab customers.
The Senior Manager, Support Engineering is a grade 9.
A Senior Manager, Support Engineering will:
See also our Support Manager Responsibilities page.
The Director of Support role extends the Support Engineering Manager Role
The VP of Support role extends the Director of Support Role through:
Support Management have the following job-family performance indicators.
Support Management roles have the following spans of control:
Support Managers with verified US Citizenship may join the GitLab US Federal Support Team. This group works through the US Federal Support portal to collaborate with Public Sector organizations and United States Government agencies in order to support, maintain, and resolve issues in their GitLab environments.
The US Federal Support Portal is unique in that it is the first restricted support instance at GitLab, this provides managers an opportunity to shape the way engineers and customers interact in order to improve the support experience in measurable ways. This instance is also used as a testbed for process change as it is easier to implement and roll out changes on a smaller scale with less impact than attempting to deploy them globally. As GitLab's federal offerings grow, the US Support workflows may serve as a template that can be used to extend federal support to other areas of the globe.
If you look forward to the challenges and opportunities and meet the requirements please apply today!
In addition to the above requirements for Global Support Managers, you will need:
Director, Support Readiness is a global role responsible for leading a Support Readiness function within the GitLab Customer Support organization. This role will lead a team of Support Operations managers and individual contributors working closely with Product, Engineering, & Sales teams to ensure that the Customer Support organization is ready to support product releases. This role will manage all aspects of planning and enablement in ensuring that the appropriate Support delivery team is ready to support all existing and new releases across the entire GitLab solution.
This includes overall supportability of the product and Support’s readiness of new releases, which entails development of training plans, assist in building tools as needed as well as preparing and delivering regular Key Reviews. Working with teams globally, this role will be responsible for enabling the global Support team towards continuous improvement in key Support metrics – Service Levels, SSAT, TTR, staffing model input, etc.
This role also closely interacts with counterparts in Product, Development, QA, UX, Customer Success and Sales, to clearly understand the upcoming release features and enabling the global delivery teams to ensure customer support has the appropriate knowledge and troubleshooting procedures to minimize time to resolution.
The culture here at GitLab is something we’re incredibly proud of. Because GitLabbers are currently located in over 51 different countries, you’ll spend your time collaborating with kind, talented, and motivated colleagues from across the globe. Some of the benefits you’ll be entitled to vary by the region or country you’re in. However, all GitLabbers are fully remote and receive a "no ask, must tell" paid-time-off policy, where we don’t count the number of days you take off annually. You can work incredibly flexible hours, enabled by our asynchronous approach to communication. We’ll also help you set up your home office environment, pay for your membership to a co-working space, and contribute to the travel costs associated with meeting other GitLab employees across the world.
Also, every year or so, we’ll invite you to our Contribute event.
Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. 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.
Next, candidates will move to interviews with Support team members:
Round 1:
Round 2:
Round 1:
Round 2:
Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer
Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.
For more details on the engineering career ladders, please review the engineering career development handbook page.
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:
See our culture page for more!
Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto and guides.