An Overview of This Role

We’re looking for a manager to lead the GitLab security incident response team (SIRT) in the Americas region. GitLab SIRT manages and investigates cybersecurity incidents across all GitLab operating environments and operates in a tierless SOC model. The team is responsible for threat hunting, alert triage, security investigations, deep-dive DFIR, and large-scale incident response, among other responsibilities.

In this role, you will manage the day-to-day work of a team of incident response engineers - setting clear performance expectations, coaching their growth, and holding the team accountable for delivering quality results. You should have a strong technical background, be comfortable owning the full incident lifecycle from alert triage to retrospective actions, and be skilled at developing others to do the same.

We are looking for someone who makes sound operational decisions under pressure and who actively looks for opportunities to "shift left" - improving defenses and leveraging AI and automation to optimize team workflows. You will implement program direction, maintain a culture of high performance, and defend GitLab infrastructure and products including GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and GitLab Dedicated for Government (FedRAMP).

This role requires availability during US West Coast business hours. Candidates based on the West Coast are preferred, though candidates in other time zones who are comfortable working these hours are also welcome to apply. Some after-hours and weekend coverage may be required to support engineers during high-severity incidents.

Learn more about the Security Operations Department:

• Security Incident Response Team
• Trust and Safety Team
• Security Logging Team
• Red Team
• Signals Engineering Team

What You'll Do

• Manage day-to-day team operations - establish clear goals, performance expectations, and accountability for direct reports; monitor progress and ensure timely delivery of quality results.
• Develop and coach incident responders - provide candid, real-time feedback; advise on career growth; and foster a culture of investigation excellence, prioritizing depth and accuracy of analysis.
• Proactively identify and fill talent gaps - participate in hiring decisions with a focus on candidates who will amplify GitLab's values and raise the team's technical bar.
• Drive engagement and retention - recognize team member contributions, address engagement risks early, and create an environment of open feedback and psychological safety.
• Cascade organizational context - translate division and company-wide strategy into clear, actionable team priorities; keep team members informed in a timely manner.
• Implement and mature incident response processes - build and improve runbooks, procedures, and team capabilities that translate functional plans into tactical execution.
• Lead incident response - serve as an escalation point and incident commander for high-severity events, including occasional nights and weekends; model the standard for quality investigations.
• Enable cross-functional collaboration - coordinate effectively with peer SecOps teams, Legal, Customer Support, and Infrastructure to resolve incidents and close defense gaps through actionable retrospective mitigations.
• Align the team on defensive improvements - drive insights from alerts, investigations, and incidents to improve GitLab's security posture and support a "shift left" mindset.
• Champion remote-first practices - consistently model and coach team members on GitLab's remote working best practices, async communication norms, and handbook-first culture.

What You'll Bring

• Proven people management experience - track record of managing and developing a team of security engineers, setting performance expectations, providing coaching, and driving accountability for results.
• Incident response leadership - demonstrated experience leading complex incident response operations, including large-scale incident coordination and the full lifecycle from triage to retrospective.
• Hands-on technical background - experience conducting security investigations and log analysis using SIEM tools (e.g., Splunk, Elastic); working knowledge of GCP and/or AWS, including cloud forensics.
• Customer-facing credibility - comfortable representing GitLab Security during customer escalations and high-visibility cybersecurity discussions.
• Proactive hunting and threat intelligence - proficiency in threat hunting based on intelligence, and familiarity with supply chain threats targeting SaaS platforms.
• AI and automation mindset - experience using AI/LLMs to improve incident response workflows and automate repetitive processes.
• Platform familiarity - experience using GitLab (or a comparable DevSecOps platform) for project tracking; bonus if you have experience responding to threats against a SaaS platform.
• Prioritization under pressure - ability to make sound operational decisions quickly, escalate issues cleanly, and guide the team on balancing what is urgent versus what is important.

Due to government requirements, you must be a United States Citizen (defined as any individual who is a citizen of the United States by law, birth, or naturalization) to fill this position.

About the Team

The Security Incident Response Team is a globally distributed team of incident response engineers split across three core regions; AMER, APAC and EMEA, and is at the forefront of security events that impact both GitLab’s products and company. We are both proactive and reactive, responding to security alerts, leading security investigations, conducting threat hunts and collaborating with peer Security Operations teams to conduct purple teaming exercises, build threat detections, improve security telemetry and investigate trending threats. Even though we’re a global team, we work together in a cross-regional manner and have automation and processes to facilitate collaboration when resolving incidents, handovers, and general collaboration for project work as well.