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From the employer's careers site First seen 29 Sept 2026 · Still live on 3 Nov 2026

Director of Engineering, Database Excellence

GitLab Remote and 1 other location
All 2 locations
  • Remote, Canada
  • Remote, United States
Remote executive full-time

Salary

$230,400-$345,600 USD per year

Apply on GitLab

Description

GitLab is seeking a Director of Engineering, Database Excellence to lead the Database Excellence stage and report to the Vice President of Data Engineering. The successful candidate will set the direction for the databases that support GitLab.com, self-managed GitLab, and GitLab Dedicated.

Responsibilities:

  • Set direction and long-range plans for the database platform in line with company strategy.
  • Own database capacity and availability outcomes for GitLab.com, and communicate database risk to senior leadership.
  • Lead and coach three Engineering Managers and develop Staff-plus engineers into leaders.
  • Drive cross-division technical decisions using data, partnering with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps.
  • Partner with Product to prioritize database platform investments and make infrastructure tradeoffs in the context of product outcomes.
  • Own the hiring plan, organization design, retention, and performance management for teams across regions.
  • Set quarterly objectives and key results and engineering key performance indicators for the stage, and manage the database infrastructure budget with FinOps.
  • Serve as an escalation point for database incidents, standardize effective processes, and keep the handbook current.

Requirements:

  • Experience leading managers of managers, including coaching newer managers.
  • Experience working hands-on with PostgreSQL at scale, including capacity planning, upgrades, replication, performance, and large production clusters.
  • Experience using data to make strategic technical decisions and connect database platform investments and tradeoffs with product outcomes.
  • Experience supporting software that customers run themselves, or working through the self-managed upgrade challenge.
  • Experience leading backend engineering teams that own production infrastructure, applying site reliability engineering practices including service level objectives, on-call operations, incident management, cost management, and automation.
  • Experience communicating clearly in writing in an asynchronous, handbook-first company.
  • Experience leading globally distributed remote teams.
  • Experience with Redis, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, object storage, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, managed database services, FinOps, AI-assisted engineering workflows, or platform and infrastructure organizations is a plus.

The base salary range for this role is $230,400-$345,600 USD.

Benefits include:

  • Benefits to support 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

Skills

Required

Nice to have

  • AI-assisted engineering workflows
  • platform and infrastructure organizations

Ready to apply?

You apply with the employer directly. Their original posting is here: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/8853843002

Apply on GitLab