Director, Technical Writing

An overview of this role

As the Director of Technical Writing, you will help redefine how technical documentation is created, delivered, and experienced across GitLab. This role reports to the Chief Design Officer and leads a team through a period of meaningful change, with a strong focus on AI, process redesign, and tighter partnership with Engineering, Product Management, and UX. You will challenge long-standing assumptions, help engineering teams take greater ownership of source documentation, and explore how documentation can become more useful inside the product experience, including through GitLab Duo.

In your first year, you will assess the current team structure, strengthen skills and capabilities for the next phase of the function, improve collaboration across partner groups, and raise satisfaction with the docs site. This is a strong fit for a leader who can bring creative, practical thinking to a mature function and turn documentation into a more integrated, actionable part of the GitLab platform.

What you’ll do

• Lead the Technical Writing organization through process evaluation and redesign, with a focus on making documentation creation more efficient and better connected to product development.
• Drive the team’s AI readiness by identifying where AI can improve workflows, reduce unnecessary handoffs, and support better documentation outcomes.
• Partner with Engineering to shift documentation earlier in the development process and establish shared ownership of first-draft technical content.
• Collaborate with Product Management and UX to identify ways technical documentation can surface more directly in the product experience.
• Shape the team structure and operating model so it supports current priorities, healthy management scope, and future capability needs.
• Develop the team’s skills and expectations for a new phase of technical writing at GitLab, including adaptability, experimentation, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Improve the end-user experience of the docs site by guiding priorities that make content more useful, accessible, and actionable.
• Own strategic decisions for the function and bring forward multiple practical options when solving complex documentation and workflow challenges while honoring GitLab values.

What you’ll bring

• Experience leading technical writing or documentation teams through organizational, process, or operating model change.
• Fluency with AI in both strategic and practical contexts, including using AI to improve workflows and evaluating where human judgment remains essential.
• Ability to build strong partnerships with Engineering, Product Management, UX, and other functions that influence product and content quality.
• Judgment to balance innovation with practicality, including a thoughtful approach to automation that improves work without treating people as replaceable.
• Creative problem-solving skills and comfort proposing several workable paths forward when facing ambiguity or long-standing constraints.
• Experience developing leaders and teams, including assessing capabilities, setting direction, and supporting change across an established organization.
• Strength in asynchronous collaboration and communication across distributed teams, with the ability to create clarity and momentum across time zones.
• Technical credibility in documentation, developer workflows, docs-as-code environments, and we also welcome candidates with transferable leadership experience from adjacent disciplines.
• Content strategy expertise to shape documentation priorities, information architecture, and how technical content connects to product goals and user needs.

About the team

The Technical Writing team helps GitLab users understand, adopt, and get value from the platform through clear, useful documentation. The team works closely with Engineering, Product Management, and UX to support product changes and improve the overall documentation experience, and it is entering a phase focused on AI readiness, process redesign, and stronger integration with the product itself. This is a distributed team that collaborates asynchronously across regions, with current working patterns shaped by time zone overlap needs and close partnership with other product development functions. The team includes experienced contributors and managers, and this role will help guide how the function evolves from here.