Director of Engineering, Security Governance - 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.

Overview of the Role

As Director of Engineering, Security Governance, you will oversee a critical part of GitLab's AI-powered DevSecOps platform: the systems we build to help customers and teams manage security policy, compliance, and AI governance at scale. You'll work at the intersection of platform security, product-led growth, and AI safety, reporting to the VP of Engineering, Security. You will guide six teams, shape the engineering vision and roadmap for this group, and help define how we and our customers govern AI-enabled and software delivery workflows through infrastructure built for correctness, scalability, and auditability.

Example Projects

• Flow ID and governance capabilities that support platform-wide AI oversight
• Auditing for the DevSecOps AI Platform (DAP) and Software Factory, the MCP Catalog, and governance dashboards

What You'll Do

• Set the engineering vision and multi-quarter roadmap across six teams focused on security policy enforcement, compliance management, security feature adoption, and AI governance, with clear quarterly outcomes for delivery and adoption.
• Lead and grow a distributed engineering organization that includes engineering managers and individual contributors, with success measured by team performance, engagement, and career development outcomes.
• Drive architectural decisions for policy enforcement, compliance, and AI governance systems to improve correctness, scalability, and auditability, with success measured by reliability and audit readiness.
• Partner with product management to define priorities and shape requirements for platform capabilities used by security-focused enterprise customers, with a focus on adoption and roadmap delivery.
• Own platform-wide AI governance infrastructure, including Flow ID, auditing for the DevSecOps AI Platform (DAP) and Software Factory, the MCP Catalog, and governance dashboards.
• Represent the Security Governance group in cross-functional discussions, executive reviews, and customer conversations.
• Establish engineering standards across delivery, observability, incident response, and code quality to improve delivery predictability, observability coverage, and incident response effectiveness.
• Contribute to GitLab's transparent, async-first way of working through issues, merge requests, and the GitLab handbook.

What You'll Bring

• Experience leading engineering organizations that include multiple teams and managers.
• Strong understanding of security fundamentals, including policy enforcement, compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP, and software supply chain security.
• Experience building platform-level or infrastructure-level systems in a SaaS or DevSecOps environment.
• Ability to partner closely with product management on roadmap planning, prioritization, and requirements.
• Strong written communication skills and experience leading in a remote, async-first environment.
• Collaborative leadership style that supports teams, values clear feedback, and aligns with GitLab's values.
• Familiarity with AI governance topics such as auditability, access control, model or tool catalogs, and responsible AI deployment, or transferable experience from related governance domains.
• Exposure to MCP, AI agent orchestration tooling, enterprise regulatory environments, or open source contribution and maintainer work is useful but not required.

About the Team

The Security Governance group is a distributed organization that works asynchronously across regions and partners closely with product management and other cross-functional stakeholders. We help GitLab meet the needs of security-conscious enterprises by delivering governance capabilities with a strong focus on usability and operational excellence.

Benefits & Compensation

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

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only: $194,800—$365,200 USD. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities.