Senior Engineering Manager, DevEx

An overview of this role

As a Senior Engineering Manager in Delivery Enablement, you'll help shape the platform foundations we use to make software delivery at GitLab more consistent, reliable, and easier to scale. You'll oversee approximately four to five engineering teams through the engineering managers who lead them, with work spanning shared development tooling, developer environments, language SDKs, API lifecycle management, and observability. This role is unique because you'll help define a Kubernetes-first platform vision that supports GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed deployments, including environments that run on premises. In your first year, you'll create clearer technical direction, strengthen execution across teams, and align work to unified platform standards. You'll report to the Director of Delivery Enablement.

You'll succeed by combining people management with technical depth: engaging in details, making sound calls amid change, and moving teams forward with transparency and accountability. This role is ideal if you have experience in platform engineering, grasp the complexities of operating across both cloud and on-prem environments, and want to work in a space where Kubernetes, Helm, AI-enabled workflows, and developer productivity intersect.

The work spans areas such as:

• Shared development tooling, including project templates and reusable CI pipeline components
• A developer environment that gives engineers a consistent path from local workstations and CI through to GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed
• Language SDKs that integrate cleanly with platform tooling so product teams can focus on business logic instead of integration plumbing
• API lifecycle conventions that give teams a common approach to versioning and evolving service interfaces
• Observability tooling that turns raw signals into SLOs and SLIs for production services

What you’ll do

• Lead engineering teams working on developer tooling and platform capabilities that support faster, more consistent software delivery across GitLab, measured through improvements in build times, observability, and delivery consistency.
• Drive a Kubernetes-first platform vision that supports both cloud and self-managed environments, including the tradeoffs needed for on-prem delivery.
• Guide technical and organizational decisions across areas such as developer environments, packaging, local and hosted testing workflows, and integration with broader platform efforts.
• Collaborate closely with engineering leaders, staff engineers, and adjacent teams to ensure DevEx investments connect cleanly with platform architecture and operational needs.
• Coach and develop the engineering managers reporting to you, partnering with them on team health, performance, prioritization, and hiring, including addressing performance concerns and shaping teams for future needs.
• Develop clear direction from high-level strategy, turning broad platform goals into actionable roadmaps with defined milestones and success metrics that teams can execute with ownership.
• Support the adoption of AI-assisted development practices by helping teams use new tools thoughtfully while maintaining engineering quality.
• Improve execution by creating clarity, encouraging strong technical discussion, and helping teams make decisions and keep moving when requirements evolve, with success measured by delivery predictability and cycle time improvements.

What you’ll bring

• Experience managing engineering managers and coaching them on execution, team health, hiring, and performance.
• Experience leading distributed engineering teams through change and ambiguity while building clarity, accountability, and momentum.
• Strong technical grounding in Kubernetes platforms, including familiarity with concepts and interfaces such as Services, container network interface, and API gateways.
• Working knowledge of Helm and containerized delivery models, especially where platform choices affect both developer experience and production outcomes.
• Experience with self-managed, on-prem, or bare metal environments (OpenShift, OpenStack, Proxmox, etc.), and an understanding of how they differ from cloud-first assumptions.
• Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and contribute informed judgment on platform architecture and cross-team system integration.
• Hands-on experience with CLI-based AI coding tools, with judgment to help teams adopt them thoughtfully while maintaining engineering standards.
• Relevant background in platform engineering, infrastructure, site reliability engineering, or developer productivity, including designing team structures and organizational approaches.

About the team

The Delivery Enablement team owns key parts of GitLab's internal developer experience, helping engineers start projects, build business logic, package services consistently, and improve day-to-day workflows. We work asynchronously across regions and partner closely with platform and engineering leadership to connect individual tools and workflows into a broader system. We're focused on an important transition: reducing reliance on older approaches, defining clearer platform standards, and building foundations that better support how GitLab develops and ships software. For more on how our team works, see [Link: Team Handbook Page].