Director of Engineering, Database Excellence - GitLab

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

We embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued.

Role Overview

As Director of Engineering, Database Excellence, you will lead the Database Excellence stage and report to the Vice President of Data Engineering. You will set the direction for the databases that support GitLab.com, self-managed GitLab, and GitLab Dedicated. Your organization owns the reliability, capacity, health, and sustainability of GitLab's application datastores, with PostgreSQL as the primary focus alongside Redis, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, and object storage.

You will be accountable for database capacity and availability on GitLab.com. You will guide long-range platform decisions while partnering with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps. The work includes reducing infrastructure costs, improving data growth controls and saturation detection, standardizing database services, rebuilding the self-managed upgrade experience, and contributing to GitLab's company-wide datastore strategy, including Cells partitioning.

What You'll Do

• 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 (OKRs) and engineering key performance indicators (KPIs) 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.

What You'll Bring

• Experience leading managers of managers, including coaching newer managers.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL at scale, including capacity planning, upgrades, replication, performance, and large production clusters.
• Track record of using data to make strategic technical decisions and connecting database platform investments with product outcomes.
• Experience supporting software that customers run themselves, or working through the self-managed upgrade challenge.
• Proven success leading backend engineering teams that own production infrastructure, applying SRE practices (SLOs, on-call operations, incident management, cost management, and automation).
• Strong asynchronous, written communication skills in a handbook-first environment.
• Experience leading globally distributed remote teams.
• Experience with Redis, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, object storage, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, managed database services, FinOps, or AI-assisted engineering workflows is a plus.

About the Team

Database Excellence includes Database Architecture, Database Automation, and Self Managed Database. Three Engineering Managers lead these teams alongside an Operations Manager, distributed across the US, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and India.

• Database Architecture: Provides datastore guidance, data growth controls, and the database review process.
• Database Automation: Builds PostgreSQL fleet automation, upgrades, provisioning, health monitoring, and an internal managed PostgreSQL offering.
• Self Managed Database: Rebuilds the upgrade and migration experience for self-managed GitLab.

Benefits & Compensation

• United States Base Salary Range: $230,400 — $345,600 USD
• Equity: Equity compensation and Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Health & Well-being: Comprehensive benefits to support your health, finances, and wellness
• Time Off: Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) & Parental Leave
• Growth: Growth and Development Fund for continuous learning
• Resource Groups: Access to Team Member Resource Groups