Engineering Manager, GitLab Delivery: Upgrades

The GitLab Delivery - Operate team is part of the Infrastructure Platforms department, which is crucial for how GitLab operates, scales, and is delivered across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed offerings. As a globally distributed team, they are responsible for deployment tooling and operational patterns to ensure customers can run GitLab reliably on various infrastructures, from virtual machines to Kubernetes clusters. The team works asynchronously across regions, collaborating with other Infrastructure, Support, and Customer Success teams to apply learnings from operating GitLab at scale into product and tooling improvements for all deployment models.

Introduction

As the Engineering Manager for GitLab Delivery - Operate, you will lead a globally distributed team focused on enhancing the deployment, upgrade, and operational reliability of GitLab for customers. This role involves shaping systems and tooling for environments from single-node VMs to large Kubernetes clusters, with an emphasis on reliability, operational simplicity, upgrade velocity, and zero-downtime capabilities across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed deployments. You will collaborate closely with a Product Manager and various teams within Infrastructure Platforms to align customer needs with engineering solutions.

This is a hands-on leadership opportunity to support a high-performing team and influence GitLab's large-scale delivery. In your first year, you will contribute to improved deployment and upgrade experiences, guide technical direction for Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and cloud-native architectures, and participate in incident management to maintain GitLab.com’s availability.

Responsibilities

• Guide a globally distributed engineering team, fostering an environment for strong work and growth in an all-remote, asynchronous setting.
• Recruit, onboard, and develop team members that align with GitLab's values and contribute to an outcome-focused engineering organization.
• Manage and enhance agile, asynchronous workflows to deliver deployment tooling and services iteratively and reliably.
• Partner with Product Management and engineering peers across Infrastructure Platforms to align team priorities with customer needs and business goals.
• Take ownership of the reliability, upgrade experience, and operational simplicity of GitLab deployments across self-managed environments, GitLab.com, and GitLab Dedicated.
• Improve deployment patterns, observability, zero-downtime capabilities, and upgrade orchestration for customers running GitLab on their own infrastructure.
• Apply technical judgment in areas such as Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and stateful application delivery to guide choices and unblock the team.
• Participate in incident management and collaborate with reliability and development teams to help maintain the availability of GitLab.com.

Requirements

• Experience leading deployment tooling, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering teams operating at significant scale.
• Strong technical knowledge of Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts for stateful applications, and upgrade orchestration patterns.
• Familiarity with cloud-native deployment architectures, database lifecycle management, schema migrations, and zero-downtime upgrade strategies.
• Experience working on enterprise-scale or consumer-scale platforms, ideally in a product-focused software environment.
• Ability to investigate complex deployment and operational issues and clearly explain tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience building high-performing, distributed teams and supporting team members in an asynchronous, all-remote environment.
• Effective cross-functional skills for collaboration with Infrastructure, Support, and Customer Success to improve customer outcomes.
• Openness to diverse professional backgrounds, including transferable skills, formal computer science education, or equivalent practical experience, along with an interest in open source and developer tools.

About Company

The GitLab Delivery - Operate team is part of the Infrastructure Platforms department, which is crucial for how GitLab operates, scales, and is delivered across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed offerings. As a globally distributed team, they are responsible for deployment tooling and operational patterns to ensure customers can run GitLab reliably on various infrastructures, from virtual machines to Kubernetes clusters. The team works asynchronously across regions, collaborating with other Infrastructure, Support, and Customer Success teams to apply learnings from operating GitLab at scale into product and tooling improvements for all deployment models.