Director, Global People Operations & Compliance

Overview

Lead GitLab's Global People Operations and Compliance team, delivering consistent, scalable, tech-enabled experiences to a global workforce across the team member lifecycle. This is a strategic, hands-on leadership role that sets the multi-year vision for innovation, AI, and team capability and turns it into results.

What you'll do

• Define and deliver a multi-year People Operations and Compliance roadmap, tied to business priorities, that uses AI and emerging technologies to elevate the team member experience.
• Build and lead a program to standardize, simplify, and automate manual workflows across the team member lifecycle (e.g. onboarding, data management, offboarding), with clear ownership, documented standards, and measurable service levels.
• Identify inefficiencies across the People Operations and broader People team, and drive the fix through to adoption.
• Establish operating models, SLAs, and metrics to improve quality and efficiency.
• Partner with key stakeholders including Compensation, Legal, Procurement, People Technology, Talent Management & Development, Talent Acquisition, People Business Partners, Payroll, IT, and Internal Audit to drive strategic priorities.
• Lead the People Operations team in managing the case management platform from intake to resolution, setting service standards, improving response times, and designing scalable escalation paths.
• Lead and develop a high-performing global team by building skills in process design, data fluency, automation, and AI-enabled ways of working, backed by clear career paths, succession plans, and a culture of continuous improvement and accountability.
• Oversee global mobility processes, serving as the escalation point for complex relocation matters and partnering with Legal to monitor regulations, ensure compliance, and keep programs effective.
• Own global employment compliance and risk exposure, setting strategy, owning audit outcomes, and managing the Senior Compliance Analyst who delivers day-to-day execution.
• Own administration for PEO partners and lead people operations setup for new entities and global expansion, including collaboration on the global employment strategy.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of HR/People Operations experience, including 5+ years leading global teams.
• Proven track record building and scaling people operations functions in complex, multi-regional global organizations.
• Working knowledge of global employment compliance, including direct experience with works councils or employee representative bodies.
• Ability to move between vision and a keen focus for detail, from presenting a roadmap to executives to debugging a broken process with the team.
• Strong judgment, stakeholder management, and communication skills, with comfort making decisions in ambiguity.
• Experience leveraging AI and automation to improve and streamline operations.
• Strong attention to detail with a focus on data accuracy.

Nice to have

• Experience in a high-growth global technology or SaaS company.
• Experience working in a public company.
• Experience transforming People Operations at scale across company stages.
• Workday: experience optimizing Workday as the core employee process platform, including data governance, self-service, consolidation, standardization, and workflow optimization.
• GreenHouse: experience with ATS infrastructure, including equity data and integrations between ATS and HRIS.
• Case management: experience implementing HR case management tools, including workflow automation, knowledge management, Workday integration, and service catalog management.

Details

• Remote role; location listed as Remote, Canada and Remote, United States.
• All GitLab roles are remote; some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements.
• Base salary range for the United States: $152,800 – $259,200 USD (base only; excludes bonuses, equity, and benefits).
• Full-time employee benefits include flexible PTO, equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan, growth and development fund, parental leave, and team member resource groups.