Engineering Manager, Architecture Engineering: Async Remote at GitLab

Overview of the Role

As an Engineering Manager for Architecture Engineering: Async, you will lead a distributed team consisting of Site Reliability Engineers and Backend Engineers. Your role involves supporting the professional development of your team while balancing production reliability concerns with critical platform projects.

Key areas of focus include orchestrating zero-downtime Redis upgrades, ensuring support for single-tenant and cell-based deployments, and managing the essential migration from queue-based job orchestration to a more durable workflow engine.

What You Will Do

• Lead, hire, and mentor a team of site reliability engineers and backend engineers, overseeing their career progression, promotions, and onboarding process.
• Be accountable for the reliability of the job processing and caching platforms, which includes managing service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, alerting, and leading weekly operational reviews.
• Manage capacity planning, handle escalations, and conduct incident follow-ups, ensuring operational work is balanced against roadmap project commitments, and proactively rescoping work when deadlines are unachievable.
• Lead the team's participation in GitLab.com's first-tier on-call rotation, managing shift coverage, onboarding, and handovers, and acting as the incident commander during high-severity incidents.
• Drive successful zero-downtime Redis version upgrades and automate tasks such as operating system patching and reboots.
• Adapt job processing capabilities to function within single-tenant and cell-based deployment architectures.
• Lead the ownership of migrating job orchestration from a queue-based system to a durable workflow engine, defining initial use cases, establishing a measurable migration path, and setting the roadmap.
• Own the quarterly planning and the team roadmap, and clarify operational responsibilities with partner teams, including those managing Git storage.

What You Will Bring

• Proven experience managing an engineering team that delivers high-performance services at scale, particularly with site reliability engineers or infrastructure engineers working on production software as a service systems.
• Technical expertise in background job processing and caching technologies like Redis and Sidekiq, providing the necessary depth to guide decisions regarding upgrades, capacity, and failure modes.
• Experience in managing reliability against service-level objectives, including defining service-level indicators, setting up burn-rate alerting, and performing capacity planning.
• Hands-on experience managing a 24/7 on-call rotation and coordinating the response to high-severity incidents.
• A demonstrated track record of effectively balancing operational maintenance and incident follow-ups with long-term roadmap projects, and advocating for realistic scope when deadlines pose challenges.
• Experience leading a fully remote team spread across various time zones in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific.

About the Team

The Async team is responsible for the background processing layer of GitLab.com, ranging from the Sidekiq infrastructure to the shared code used for enqueuing jobs. Product teams build the jobs, and our team ensures the platform running them is fast and highly reliable.

Our Redis clusters provide essential services for caching, sessions, rate limiting, queues, and managing shared state. We also support data durability through backup and restore verification, object storage, and operational support for Git repository storage. This operational support includes executing restore drills, managing capacity rebalancing, and provisioning resources.

We staff GitLab.com's first-tier production on-call rotation in 8-hour shifts covering the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, responsible for triaging every paging alert and escalating to the correct team when necessary.

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

GitLab is committed to supporting its employees' health, finances, and well-being through comprehensive benefits, which include:

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

Please note that we welcome candidates at various experience levels; many successful applicants do not meet every single requirement. Furthermore, research indicates that individuals from underrepresented groups may be less likely to apply unless they meet every listed qualification. If you are enthusiastic about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to review your application.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires team members from countries globally. While all our roles are remote, certain positions may have specific location-based eligibility constraints. Our Talent Acquisition team is available to assist with location questions once the recruiting process has commenced.