Director of Engineering, Organizations & Cells

GitLab is seeking a Director of Engineering in India to lead the charter of building and running the engineering organization that takes Cells from first production migrations to the default way GitLab.com operates.

Overview of the Role GitLab.com is being rebuilt as a horizontally scalable cluster. Two primitives make that possible: Organizations, the tenant boundary that makes a customer's data a single addressable, portable unit, and Cells, independent GitLab instances that host those Organizations and can be provisioned on demand across clouds and regions.

What you will do

• Delivery of the Cells and Organizations roadmap , cell provisioning and lifecycle, the routing and topology layer, organization data migration tooling, and feature parity across the platform.
• Migration execution. Cohort-based movement of customer Organizations onto cells with zero data loss, verified rollback, and no downtime outside the tenant in flight.
• A multi-cloud, multi-region cell footprint and the architectural decisions that govern what stays cell-local and what crosses boundaries.
• The engineering organization. Hire, level, and develop managers and senior ICs across several teams. Set the technical bar and the operating cadence.
• Cross-functional leadership. This charter touches nearly every product group at GitLab. You will drive commitments and sequencing with peer engineering leaders, Product, Infrastructure, and Security , much of it asynchronously, across time zones, in public issues and merge requests.

How success is measured

• Customer Organizations running on cells in production, migrated cleanly and on schedule.
• Availability and latency improvements attributable to isolation and load distribution.
• Infrastructure cost per unit of capacity trending down as the footprint grows.
• Throughput and retention of the teams you build.

What you will bring

• Engineering leadership at director scale
• Experience leading multiple teams through managers (roughly 25–60 engineers), including hiring and developing managers.
• A track record of shipping multi-quarter infrastructure programs with hard external dependencies.
• Comfort operating as a peer to VPs and staff-plus engineers.
• Strong written communication.
• Distributed systems depth
• Working fluency in relational database scaling, data migration at scale, and request routing.
• Real operational experience: incident command, capacity planning, and designing for blast-radius containment.
• Cloud infrastructure at depth on at least one major provider, ideally more than one.
• AI-native engineering
• You understand what agentic access patterns do to a platform's read volume, concurrency, and authorization model, and you design for that rather than retrofitting it.
• You use AI tooling in your own engineering practice and have raised the bar for it across a team.

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave