Engineering Manager, Tenant Scale: Gitaly
About the role
An overview of this role
As an Engineering Manager, Gitaly at GitLab, you'll guide a deeply technical team focused on building, maintaining, and providing expertise on Gitaly, GitLab's Git data storage tier. The team's work spans development of Gitaly, support for teams across GitLab, new tooling, scalability improvements, new data formats, and ongoing maintenance of the Gitaly codebase.
This role is a good fit for you if you can guide senior and staff engineers through complex, long-horizon technical work while building a culture of technical rigor, clear accountability, and ownership. You'll help the team balance roadmap delivery with GitLab product and infrastructure priorities, especially as much of the team's work is centered on scaling Git storage and adjacent foundational work. Clear written communication and thoughtful technical judgment are central to how this team succeeds.
Project areas include:
- Scaling Git storage
- Gitaly-related infrastructure and foundational performance work
What you’ll do
- Manage a team of senior and staff engineers working on Gitaly and Gitaly-related infrastructure.
- Build a team culture where technical rigor, clear accountability, and ownership are the norm.
- Drive execution on complex, long-horizon work across performance, scalability, maintainability, and core Gitaly architecture.
- Guide the team in balancing roadmap delivery with GitLab product and infrastructure priorities.
- Support your engineers' growth through feedback, mentoring, career development, and stretch opportunities.
- Foster strong written communication and asynchronous alignment across a fully distributed team.
- Partner with teams like Git and other stakeholders who rely on Gitaly expertise for performance, feature design, and roadmap clarity.
- Represent the team credibly with cross-functional partners and in stakeholder conversations about Gitaly direction, performance, and scalability.
What you’ll bring
- Experience managing engineering teams with direct reports, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
- A management philosophy centered on building engineer agency and ownership, with credibility grounded in consistency, follow-through, and technical judgment.
- Proven ability to guide highly specialized engineers through ambiguity, structured debate, high-stakes technical tradeoffs, and the realities of operating a service that is critical to GitLab.
- Strong written communication and remote, asynchronous collaboration skills across distributed, multi-timezone teams. You're comfortable moving work forward in documents, issue threads, and asynchronous reviews, not just in meetings.
- A track record of delivering under pressure on ambiguous, long-horizon technical projects with clear outcomes, and of reasoning from fundamentals about maintainability, technical debt, and long-term platform viability.
- Hands-on background in version control systems, distributed systems, storage engines, or other low-level infrastructure domains, with the ability to engage credibly with systems code and architecture, ideally in Go or similarly performance-sensitive environments.
About the team
On the Gitaly team, we build, maintain, and provide expertise on Gitaly, GitLab's Git data storage tier. Our core work includes development of Gitaly, supporting teams across GitLab, and ensuring the long-term viability of the project. We are a deeply technical team that balances long-running technical work with practical delivery. Strong collaboration with partner teams is central to how we succeed.