Senior Engineering Manager, DevEx

An overview of this role

As a Senior Engineering Manager within Delivery Enablement, you'll manage four teams: developer tooling (Caproni), observability enablement, performance enablement, and development analytics. Your mandate is to build a coherent, Kubernetes-first platform vision that serves GitLab.com, Dedicated, and thousands of self-managed deployments, a rare combination that most companies split into cloud-only or pure on-prem. In your first year, you'll create clarity around technical direction, strengthen team execution, and align work with 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're passionate about 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.

• Developer Tooling (Caproni): Platform foundations and tools that help engineers write and test code efficiently
• Observability Enablement: Provide infrastructure and tooling to enable engineers to monitor and operatre production services
• Performance Enablement: Helping teams optimize build and delivery performance
• Development Analytics: Providing insights into developer experience and workflow metrics

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.
• Manage team health, performance, and prioritization in a remote environment, including coaching team members, addressing performance concerns, and helping shape the team 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 leading remote engineering teams through change and ambiguity, with a track record of building clarity, maintaining accountability, and guiding teams through organizational change.
• Strong technical background in Kubernetes platforms, with hands-on familiarity with standard Kubernetes concepts and interfaces (Services, CNI, API Gateway, etc.) and sound judgment in guiding teams on effective platform usage and best practices.
• Working knowledge of Helm and containerized delivery models, especially in environments where platform choices impact developer experience and production outcomes.
• Experience with self-managed, on-prem, or bare metal environments (OpenShift, OpenStack, Proxmox, etc.), with understanding of how they differ from cloud-first assumptions.
• Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and contribute informed opinions on platform architecture and system integration across teams.
• Experience with performance management and coaching, including helping team members improve or making difficult personnel decisions.
• Hands-on experience with CLI-based AI coding tools, with judgment to help teams adopt them thoughtfully while maintaining engineering standards.
• Relevant experience in platform, infrastructure, SRE, or developer productivity roles, including experience designing team structures and organizational approaches.

About the team

We own 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 are working through an important transition: reducing reliance on older approaches, creating clearer platform standards, and building new foundations that better support how GitLab develops and ships software. For more on how GitLab works, see [Link: Team Handbook Page].