Director of Engineering, Organizations & Cells

Job description

About this 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. The target is a 100x increase in headroom for GitLab.com, delivered without customers ever seeing a cell. Same domain, same URLs, same product — a substrate underneath that scales by adding capacity rather than by negotiating with a single database. The boundary we are building is worth more than the scale it unlocks. An isolated Organization can guarantee where its data lives and what travels with it. That turns data residency, regional control, in-region AI and search compute, and enforceable tenant-level policy into product capabilities rather than deployment exceptions. It is the foundation for a class of enterprise and regulated-market offerings that a shared-instance architecture cannot support. We are hiring a Director of Engineering in India to lead this charter. You will build and run the engineering organization that takes Cells from first production migrations to the default way GitLab.com operates.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• Experience leading multiple teams through managers (roughly 25–60 engineers), including hiring and developing managers.

Qualifications and requirements

• 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.
• 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.
• Experience leading multiple teams through managers (roughly 25–60 engineers), including hiring and developing managers.