Engineering Manager - Database Change Management

Engineering Manager - Database Change Management
An overview of this role

As Engineering Manager, Database Change Management, you'll lead a remote backend engineering team in the Database Excellence stage. The team owns database health and the database upgrade experience across GitLab.com and self-managed deployments. You'll guide two missions at once: keeping one of the largest PostgreSQL installations in the world within its capacity limits, and delivering a multi-year replacement of GitLab's database migration system so customer upgrades become dramatically faster and safer. Reporting to the Database Excellence stage's engineering leader, you'll build and grow a new engineering cluster in India, keep the long-horizon platform program on track, and help the team maintain production health through fully asynchronous, handbook-first ways of working.

Some examples of our projects:

• Replacing GitLab's sequential database migration system with a dependency graph model and three-phase upgrades, helping self-managed customers stay current with fewer upgrade stops
• Improving database health monitoring, cloud-managed database observability, and saturation and capacity forecasting for GitLab.com and self-managed deployments

What you’ll do

• Lead a distributed team of backend engineers working fully asynchronously across time zones.
• Hire, onboard, and develop an India-based engineering cluster, including intermediate engineers and a senior technical anchor.
• Balance the team's database health responsibilities with the multi-quarter migration system replacement so both missions continue to make progress.
• Protect the replatforming program's critical path by limiting production interruptions for engineers focused on it while meeting the team's operational commitments.
• Coach engineers from intermediate through senior levels, supporting their growth, ownership, and impact.
• Run the team async-first through written decision records, visible priorities, and management practices that work when team members share few or no working hours.
• Partner with Distribution, Quality Assurance (QA), database framework teams, Database Architecture, Database Automation, and infrastructure leadership.
• Represent the team's capacity, priorities, risks, and delivery status to senior engineering leadership.

What you’ll bring

• Engineering management experience leading remote, distributed teams across many time zones, including team members with little or no overlap with your working day.
• Production PostgreSQL experience, including capacity planning and enough technical depth to contribute credibly to migration system and reliability design discussions without needing to own the designs.
• Experience leading a long-horizon platform or infrastructure program alongside operational responsibilities and keeping both on track.
• Hiring and team-building experience, including experience standing up a new team or site cluster, or closely related work.
• Strong written communication skills and experience using writing as a primary management tool.
• Experience coaching and developing backend engineers across multiple levels.
• Ability to set priorities and protect focus while maintaining production health and meeting operational commitments.
• Experience collaborating cross-functionally with software engineering, quality, distribution, database, and infrastructure partners.

About the team

We work fully asynchronously and handbook-first with Database Architecture, Database Automation, Distribution, and QA. Our work helps address the fact that roughly a third of self-managed customers are two or more upgrade stops behind.