Team Building & Leadership

• Personally source, evaluate, and select 4 exceptional engineers for the pilot squad. You own this hiring bar directly rather than delegating it to a pipeline.
• Negotiate allocation models (100% vs. partial/dual-hat) with each engineer's current EM, balancing team commitments against the pilot's needs.
• Set the technical direction and working norms for a small, fast-moving team: how work is scoped, how decisions get made, and how progress gets reported.
• Mentor the engineers on this team in root-cause diagnosis and shift-left thinking, raising the bar for rigor versus reaching for the nearest patch.

Deep Technical Exploration & Experimentation

• Lead hands-on investigation to instrument and baseline the three top-level metrics (MRPM, pipeline success rate, pipeline latency) so the org has an honest starting point before any fix is proposed.
• Diagnose the highest-leverage friction points dragging each metric down, and validate hypotheses with real data before committing team time to a fix.
• Design and implement fixes that compound, including shift-left quality changes, tooling investment, and better context and interfaces for both humans and agents, rather than one-off patches.
• Stay hands-on enough to review architecture, dig into pipeline internals, and unblock the team on hard technical problems directly.

Internal Adoption & Non-Linear Productivity

• Own a small set of high-impact friction areas as pathfinders, driving each from diagnosis through fix to measurable metric movement.
• Work directly with affected engineering teams to ensure fixes are trusted, adopted, and don't quietly get reverted or worked around.
• Track and report metric movement honestly, including when a bet didn't pay off.
• Capture and codify reusable patterns and playbooks so that fixes validated by this team can be adopted org-wide with minimal friction.

Operations, Risk & Enablement

• Set a cadence for reporting impact back to EM peers and leadership, framed around metric movement rather than activity.
• Ensure the pilot's fixes degrade gracefully and don't introduce new reliability risk into CI/CD systems that other teams depend on.
• Help define what "graduation" from pilot to permanent function looks like, and build the case (or the honest counter-case) based on results.

What You'll Bring

General

• Track record leading small, high-autonomy engineering teams, ideally in developer productivity, CI/CD, platform, or infrastructure reliability, measured on system-level outcomes rather than feature delivery.
• Deep comfort with CI/CD and build systems. You understand why pipelines flake, why they're slow, and what actually moves success-rate and latency numbers versus what just feels like progress.
• Demonstrated root-cause instinct and a bar for talent over headcount: you'd rather run understaffed than fill a seat with someone good-enough.
• Comfort operating under metrics-driven accountability, including publicly baselining a number and reporting honestly against it.
• Strong executive-level communication. This pilot has direct visibility to engineering leadership.

Nice to have

• Experience with agentic or AI-assisted development workflows, and a view on where human/agent friction shows up differently than pure human friction.
• Prior experience running a defined-window pilot or 0 to 1 initiative with explicit success criteria.
• Familiarity with GitLab's own CI/CD internals, or equivalent depth on another large-scale build/test system.

United States Salary Range

$190,000—$245,000 USD

How 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.

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Equal Opportunity Employer

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.