Principal Cybersecurity Incident Manager (USA)

An overview of the role 

The Cybersecurity Incident Manager (Incident Commander) leads and coordinates critical security incident response across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and GitLab’s corporate environments. This role serves as the primary authority during high-impact security events, orchestrating cross-functional teams, managing incident lifecycles from detection through resolution, and driving continuous improvement in GitLab's incident response capabilities.  As the founding Incident Commander in the team, you will also build upon and mature the incident command function. While this role does not carry a formal on-call rotation, the nature of security incident response may occasionally require availability outside of core business hours for high-severity events.

Find out more about the Security Operations Department here: Security Incident Response Team

What you’ll do

• Incident Command & Crisis Leadership: Serve as the primary Incident Commander for critical and complex security events across GitLab.com and corporate infrastructure, providing decisive leadership during high-stress situations
• Cross-Functional Coordination: Orchestrate response efforts across Security Operations, Infrastructure, Legal, Engineering, Product, and executive stakeholders, maintaining clear communication streams and unified action plans
• Technical Collaboration Leadership: Lead technical calls and/or establish effective async collaboration during incidents, managing participant contributions, keeping discussions focused, and ensuring efficient progress toward resolution
• Blameless Post-Incident Reviews: Conduct comprehensive post-incident reviews and retrospectives, driving the creation of action items, process improvements, and systemic enhancements
• Playbook Development: Design, maintain, and continuously improve incident response playbooks, runbooks, and standard operating procedures for various incident scenarios in conjunction with SIRT engineers
• Process Engineering: Build and refine incident command frameworks, communication protocols, and escalation procedures that scale across a global, all-remote organization
• Training & Mentorship: Develop and deliver incident command training programs, mentor incident commanders at various levels, and build organizational muscle memory for effective incident response
• Stakeholder Communication: Translate technical incident details into clear, actionable communications for executive leadership, customers, and internal stakeholders
• Automation & Tooling: Identify opportunities for automation in incident response workflows and collaborate with engineering teams to build tools that enhance incident management capabilities
• Threat Landscape Awareness: Maintain deep understanding of current threat actors, attack vectors, and security trends to inform incident response preparedness

What you’ll bring

• 10+ years of experience in information security, with at least 5 years focused on incident response, security operations, or related disciplines
• Demonstrated experience serving as Incident Commander for critical security events in complex, distributed environments
• Command Presence: Proven ability to lead and coordinate teams during high-stress, high-impact incidents with clarity, authority, and calm decisiveness
• Strong knowledge of attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (eg MITRE ATT&CK framework)
• Technical proficiency with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and modern application architectures
• Experience with security information and event management (SIEM) platforms, log analysis, and security monitoring tools
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and executive leadership
• Demonstrated ability to build relationships and coordinate effectively across security, engineering, legal, and business teams
• Ability to identify systemic issues from incident patterns and drive organizational improvements
• Share our values, and work in accordance with those values
• Nice to haves: Experience working with / in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering; Experience with GitLab the product and familiarity with DevSecOps practices; Experience working in an all-remote or distributed team environment