An overview of this role

As an Engineering Manager, Git at GitLab, you’ll guide a deeply technical team focused on building, maintaining, and providing expertise on the Git version control system. The team’s work spans upstream development of Git, support for teams across GitLab, new tooling, scalability improvements, new data formats, and ongoing maintenance of the Git codebase.

This role is a good fit for you if you can guide senior and staff engineers through complex, long-horizon technical work while building a culture of technical rigor, clear accountability, and ownership. You’ll help the team balance upstream open source development with GitLab product and infrastructure priorities, especially as much of the team’s work is centered on Scaling Git and adjacent foundational work.

You’ll work in an upstream-first environment where strong relationships with the Git community matter. Mailing-list based collaboration, clear written communication, and thoughtful technical judgment are central to how this team succeeds.

Project areas include:

• Scaling Git
• Git-related infrastructure and foundational performance work

What you’ll do

• Manage a team of senior and staff engineers working on the Git version control system and Git-related infrastructure.
• Build a team culture where technical rigor, clear accountability, and ownership are the norm.
• Drive execution on complex, long-horizon work across performance, scalability, maintainability, and core Git architecture.
• Help the team balance upstream open source development with GitLab product and infrastructure priorities.
• Support your engineers’ growth through feedback, mentoring, career development, and stretch opportunities.
• Foster strong written communication and asynchronous alignment across a fully distributed team.
• Partner with downstream teams like Gitaly and other stakeholders who rely on Git expertise for performance, feature design, and roadmap clarity.
• Represent the team credibly with cross-functional partners and in stakeholder conversations about Git direction, performance, and scalability.

What you’ll bring

• Experience managing engineering teams with direct reports, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
• A management philosophy centered on building engineer agency and ownership, with credibility grounded in consistency, follow-through, and technical judgment.
• Proven ability to guide highly specialized engineers through ambiguity, structured debate, high-stakes technical tradeoffs, and the realities of upstream open source development, including community review and long feedback cycles.
• Strong written communication and remote, asynchronous collaboration skills across distributed, multi-timezone teams. You’re comfortable moving work forward in documents, issue threads, and asynchronous reviews, not just in meetings.
• A track record of delivering under pressure on ambiguous, long-horizon technical projects with clear outcomes, and of reasoning from fundamentals about maintainability, technical debt, and long-term platform viability.
• Hands-on background in version control systems, distributed systems, storage engines, or other low-level infrastructure domains, with the ability to engage credibly with systems code and architecture, ideally in C, Go, or similarly performance-sensitive environments.

About the team

The Git team is focused on building, maintaining, and providing expertise on the Git version control system. Core work includes upstream development of Git, supporting teams across GitLab, fostering the Git community, and ensuring the long-term viability of the project.

This is a deeply technical team that operates in an upstream-first environment. Building strong relationships with the Git community, engaging in mailing-list based collaboration, and balancing long-running technical work with practical delivery are central to how the team succeeds.

Today, a significant share of the team’s focus is on Scaling Git and adjacent foundational work, with limited remaining capacity outside that effort.