Director of Engineering, Organizations & Cells

Overview of the Role

GitLab.com is being rebuilt as a horizontally scalable cluster. Two primitives make that possible: Organizations, the tenant boundary that makes a customer's data a single addressable, portable unit, and Cells, independent GitLab instances that host those Organizations and can be provisioned on demand across clouds and regions.

The target is a 100x increase in headroom for GitLab.com, delivered without customers ever seeing a cell. Same domain, same URLs, same product — a substrate underneath that scales by adding capacity rather than by negotiating with a single database.

The boundary we are building is worth more than the scale it unlocks. An isolated Organization can guarantee where its data lives and what travels with it. That turns data residency, regional control, in-region AI and search compute, and enforceable tenant-level policy into product capabilities rather than deployment exceptions. It is the foundation for a class of enterprise and regulated-market offerings that a shared-instance architecture cannot support.

We are hiring a Director of Engineering in India to lead this charter. You will build and run the engineering organization that takes Cells from first production migrations to the default way GitLab.com operates.

What you will do

• Delivery of the Cells and Organizations roadmap — cell provisioning and lifecycle, the routing and topology layer, organization data migration tooling, and feature parity across the platform.
• Migration execution. Cohort-based movement of customer Organizations onto cells with zero data loss, verified rollback, and no downtime outside the tenant in flight.
• A multi-cloud, multi-region cell footprint and the architectural decisions that govern what stays cell-local and what crosses boundaries.
• The engineering organization. Hire, level, and develop managers and senior ICs across several teams. Set the technical bar and the operating cadence.
• Cross-functional leadership. This charter touches nearly every product group at GitLab. You will drive commitments and sequencing with peer engineering leaders, Product, Infrastructure, and Security — much of it asynchronously, across time zones, in public issues and merge requests.

How success is measured

• Customer Organizations running on cells in production, migrated cleanly and on schedule.
• Availability and latency improvements attributable to isolation and load distribution.
• Infrastructure cost per unit of capacity trending down as the footprint grows.
• Throughput and retention of the teams you build.

What you will bring

Engineering leadership at director scale

• Experience leading multiple teams through managers (roughly 25–60 engineers), including hiring and developing managers.
• A track record of shipping multi-quarter infrastructure programs with hard external dependencies — the kind where the hardest problem is sequencing across ten teams, not writing the code.
• Comfort operating as a peer to VPs and staff-plus engineers: you can hold an architectural position on technical merit and change it when the evidence changes.
• Strong written communication. GitLab is remote and asynchronous by default; influence here is exercised in documents.

Distributed systems depth

• You have built and operated large-scale distributed systems in production — multi-tenant SaaS, sharded or cell-based architectures, control planes, or data platforms at comparable scale.
• Working fluency in relational database scaling (partitioning, sharding, replication), data migration at scale, and request routing.
• Real operational experience: incident command, capacity planning, and designing for blast-radius containment.
• Cloud infrastructure at depth on at least one major provider, ideally more than one.

AI-native engineering

• You understand what agentic access patterns do to a platform's read volume, concurrency, and authorization model, and you design for that rather than retrofitting it.
• You use AI tooling in your own engineering practice and have raised the bar for it across a team.