Senior Engineering Manager, Non-Linear Productivity

About the role

Senior Engineering Managers at GitLab own outcomes for a defined engineering domain, build and grow the team that delivers them, and are trusted to operate with significant autonomy against a clear mandate.

This Senior Engineering Manager role focuses on driving non-linear productivity by building and leading a small, hand-picked team of engineers who find and fix the highest-leverage friction points in GitLab's own SDLC. Rather than incremental team management, this is a 0 to 1 team-building mandate. You will personally recruit 4 exceptional engineers, define how they work, and drive them through a root-cause, shift-left approach to engineering productivity, measured in system-level metrics (MRPM, pipeline success rate, pipeline latency), not story points or activity.

You will act as a bridge between the pilot squad, engineering managers whose teams are affected by friction points, and leadership, ensuring the team's fixes deliver durable, measurable value before any of it is proposed as a permanent function.

This role reports to a VP-level engineering leader.

What you'll do

Vision & Strategy

• Define and continuously refine the operating model for the non-linear productivity pilot: what "friction" means, how it's diagnosed, and how fixes are prioritized against the three system-level metrics.
• Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities (step-change fixes rather than incremental gains) across the SDLC, including flaky tests, review latency, pipeline reliability, tooling gaps, and context loss for both human and agentic contributors.
• Translate an intentionally broad, ambiguous mandate ("find the friction, fix it at the root") into a concrete, time-boxed roadmap with defined milestones for a 3-month pilot window.

Team Building & Leadership

• Personally source, evaluate, and select