An overview of this role

As Engineering Manager for GitLab CD, you'll build and lead a brand-new, globally distributed team at the forefront of GitLab's next generation of Continuous Deployment capabilities. This is a greenfield opportunity: you'll hire foundational engineers, shape the team's culture and ways of working, and own delivery of a first-class CD product within GitLab's DevSecOps platform.

Your team will build a CD engine that goes beyond script execution—bringing true reconciliation, live state awareness, durable orchestration, and AI-native governance to GitLab's platform. The goal is to deliver features that enable customers to deploy software reliably, safely, and with confidence. This work sits at the intersection of GitLab's core platform and its AI strategy, making it a high-visibility, fast-moving area of the product.

You'll partner closely with Product Management, cross-functional engineering teams, and infrastructure stakeholders to align technical decisions with customer needs and business goals, while building a team culture grounded in GitLab's values.

What you'll do

• Build and lead a new globally distributed engineering team, creating an environment where team members can do their best work and grow their careers.
• Hire, onboard, and develop engineers who embody GitLab's values and hold themselves to a high standard of quality and ownership.
• Partner with Product Management and cross-functional engineering teams to shape the roadmap, make sound architectural decisions, and deliver against product commitments.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence across reliability, performance, security, and maintainability, while keeping the pace expected in a fast-moving product area.
• Champion AI as a core part of how the team works, encouraging engineers to incorporate AI tools into their daily workflows to drive efficiency and innovation.
• Hold regular 1:1s, provide continuous feedback, and support engineers' professional growth through coaching and skill development.
• Drive a healthy delivery cadence by maintaining visibility into milestone progress, identifying blockers early, and proactively addressing patterns before they require escalation.
• Participate in the Incident Management on-call rotation to help ensure availability targets for GitLab.com are met.

What you'll bring

• Demonstrated leadership experience managing high-performing engineering teams, with hands-on technical credibility to provide architectural guidance and participate meaningfully in technical discussions.
• Strong background in distributed systems and durable workflow execution, including state persistence and replay patterns.
• Experience building or leading teams working on release orchestration, deployment automation, or continuous delivery at scale.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes deployment patterns and GitOps workflows, including progressive delivery strategies such as blue/green and canary deployments.
• Experience with policy-based governance and event-driven architectures in building reliable, enterprise-grade delivery systems.
• Proven ability to build and lead teams in early-stage contexts, including defining team processes, hiring foundational members, and establishing a strong team culture.
• Strong cross-functional alignment and consensus-building skills, with the ability to drive decisions and execution even in the face of ambiguity or competing priorities.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a bias toward async, handbook-first practices and transparency.
• Experience in remote-first, globally distributed organizations and comfort operating in environments with high autonomy and high accountability.
• Track record of fostering inclusive team cultures where engineers feel psychologically safe to contribute, take calculated risks, and hold each other to high standards.
• Strong alignment with GitLab's values (Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency) with demonstrated examples from previous roles.

About the team

The GitLab CD team is a newly formed group within the Deploy stage. The team will be primarily Go engineers, with Ruby on Rails and frontend engineers joining as the product matures. As CD Engineering Manager you will work closely with adjacent teams across Verify, Runner, and Infrastructure, building in a collaborative, async-first environment where engineers take real ownership of outcomes. This is an exciting opportunity to help shape something new within an established company operating at significant scale.