Senior Director, Production and Tenant Platform Engineering

As Senior Director of Production and Tenant Platform Engineering, you will lead the foundational engineering teams responsible for the reliability, scalability, and lifecycle of the GitLab platform. The role brings together two critical domains: Tenant Experience (the operator and customer facing platform surfaces) and Production Engineering (the infrastructure that powers GitLab.com and self-managed offerings). You will lead an organization of managers and engineers who own the entire stack, from network infrastructure, fleet management, and cloud cost efficiency to observability, tenant controls, and the upgrade lifecycle, evolving GitLab's platform architecture to support massive scale across SaaS, Dedicated, and self-managed environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead a unified platform strategy: define and execute a cohesive roadmap aligning Production Engineering (Fleet, Network, Cost, Responder) with Tenant Experience (Observability, Controls, Upgrade Tooling).
• Drive operational excellence and reliability, with deep accountability for production outcomes: incident management, alert efficacy, and service-level reliability for GitLab.com and the global customer base.
• Scale engineering leadership by managing a senior management team, coaching on performance, hiring, team structure, and execution.
• Evolve the platform architecture: optimize fleet management and cloud utilization, mature observability and self-healing frameworks, and deliver a modern upgrade experience bridging legacy Omnibus and Kubernetes/cloud-native models.
• Collaborate with Engineering Directors, Product Leaders, and Reliability/Delivery teams to align platform investments with business priorities.
• Translate strategy into execution, making tough trade-off decisions between immediate production stability and long-term architectural health.
• Champion initiatives that reduce operational toil, improve the operator experience, and standardise platform interfaces across a modular service architecture.

Qualifications

• Executive engineering leadership: proven experience leading large, distributed engineering organizations (managing managers) in complex, high-scale platform environments.
• Deep production expertise: a track record of owning critical production systems, including incident response, traffic management, capacity planning, and cloud infrastructure costs.
• Platform engineering acumen: deep familiarity with large-scale distributed systems, containerized and Kubernetes-based platforms, infrastructure-as-code, and the operational challenges of multi-tenant SaaS alongside diverse self-managed deployments.
• Strategic architectural judgment: ability to evaluate complex technical trade-offs such as build vs. buy and cloud-first vs. on-prem constraints, providing clear, defensible direction.
• Change management: experience leading teams through significant growth, organizational change, or technical pivots.
• Operational focus: a proven ability to raise the bar on production quality, with initiatives that measurably improved reliability, reduced toil, or optimized infrastructure efficiency.