Senior Engineering Manager, Non-Linear Productivity

This Senior Engineering Manager role focuses on driving non-linear productivity by building and leading a small, hand-picked team of engineers who find and fix the highest-leverage friction points in GitLab's own SDLC. Rather than incremental team management, this is a 0 to 1 team-building mandate: you will personally recruit 4 exceptional engineers, define how they work, and drive them through a root-cause, shift-left approach to engineering productivity, measured in system-level metrics (merge requests per month, pipeline success rate, pipeline latency), not story points or activity. You will act as a bridge between the pilot squad, affected engineering managers, and leadership, reporting to a VP-level engineering leader.

Responsibilities

• Define and continuously refine the operating model for the non-linear productivity pilot: what friction means, how it is diagnosed, and how fixes are prioritized against the three system-level metrics.
• Identify step-change productivity opportunities across the SDLC, including flaky tests, review latency, pipeline reliability, tooling gaps, and context loss for both human and agentic contributors.
• Translate an intentionally broad mandate into a concrete, time-boxed roadmap with defined milestones for a 3-month pilot window.
• Personally source, evaluate, and select 4 exceptional engineers for the pilot squad, owning the hiring bar directly.
• Lead hands-on investigation to instrument and baseline the top-level metrics, diagnose the highest-leverage friction points, and validate hypotheses with real data before committing team time.
• Design and implement fixes that compound, including shift-left quality changes, tooling investment, and better context and interfaces for humans and agents.
• Stay hands-on enough to review architecture, dig into pipeline internals, and unblock the team on hard technical problems directly.
• Track and report metric movement honestly, capture reusable patterns and playbooks, and help define what graduation from pilot to permanent function looks like.

Qualifications

• Track record leading small, high-autonomy engineering teams, ideally in developer productivity, CI/CD, platform, or infrastructure reliability, measured on system-level outcomes.
• Deep comfort with CI/CD and build systems: you understand why pipelines flake, why they are slow, and what actually moves success-rate and latency numbers.
• Demonstrated root-cause instinct and a bar for talent over headcount.
• Comfort operating under metrics-driven accountability, including publicly baselining a number and reporting against it.