Director of Engineering, Database Excellence

Overview

Lead the Database Excellence stage at GitLab, setting direction for the databases that support GitLab.com, self-managed GitLab, and GitLab Dedicated, with PostgreSQL as the primary focus alongside Redis, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, and object storage. Reports to the Vice President of Data Engineering.

What you'll do

• Set direction and long-range plans for the database platform in line with company strategy.
• Own database capacity and availability outcomes for GitLab.com, and communicate database risk to senior leadership.
• Lead and coach three Engineering Managers and develop Staff-plus engineers into leaders.
• Drive cross-division technical decisions using data, partnering with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps.
• Partner with Product to prioritize database platform investments and make infrastructure tradeoffs in the context of product outcomes.
• Own the hiring plan, organization design, retention, and performance management for teams across regions.
• Set quarterly objectives and key results and engineering key performance indicators for the stage, and manage the database infrastructure budget with FinOps.
• Serve as an escalation point for database incidents, standardize effective processes, and keep the handbook current.

What you'll need

• Experience leading managers of managers, including coaching newer managers.
• Experience working hands-on with PostgreSQL at scale, including capacity planning, upgrades, replication, performance, and large production clusters.
• Experience using data to make strategic technical decisions and connect database platform investments and tradeoffs with product outcomes.
• Experience supporting software that customers run themselves, or working through the self-managed upgrade challenge.
• Experience leading backend engineering teams that own production infrastructure, applying site reliability engineering practices including service level objectives, on-call operations, incident management, cost management, and automation.
• Experience communicating clearly in writing in an asynchronous, handbook-first company.
• Experience leading globally distributed remote teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with Redis, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, object storage, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, managed database services, FinOps, AI-assisted engineering workflows, or platform and infrastructure organizations.

Details

• Location: Remote, Canada; Remote, United States.
• Base salary range for United States residents: $230,400 to $345,600 USD (base only, excluding bonuses, equity, and benefits).
• Team works across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India.