Director of Engineering, Security Factory

Job description

About this role

An overview of this role As Director of Engineering, Security Factory , you will lead the engineering organization responsible for GitLab’s customer-facing security capabilities across our AI-powered DevSecOps platform. You’ll help shape how customers detect, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities across modern software workflows by guiding teams that build proprietary scanners, AI-driven detection engines, agentic remediation flows, and supporting security foundations. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, Sec section , you’ll set the engineering vision and roadmap for a distributed group of nine teams, including engineering managers, and create the conditions for strong delivery, sound technical direction, and healthy team growth. Some examples of our projects: • Advanced proprietary scanners for Static Application Security Testing, Software Composition Analysis, Secret Detection, and related AI and machine learning detection engines • Agentic security flows for autofix and guided remediation, plus research that strengthens AI security, threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and security foundations

Responsibilities

• Set the engineering vision and multi-quarter roadmap across teams working on proprietary scanners, AI-driven security workflows, research functions, vulnerability management, and security foundations.
• Lead a distributed engineering organization of managers and individual contributors, with a focus on team performance, engagement, and career development.
• Drive architectural decisions for AI and machine learning detection engines, agentic remediation flows, and scalable scanning infrastructure.
• Partner with product management to define priorities, shape requirements, and deliver security capabilities for customers in regulated and security-conscious environments.
• Own the engineering delivery of GitLab’s proprietary application security scanners, agentic remediation workflows, and AI Security Research efforts.
• Represent the Security Factory stage in cross-functional planning, executive reviews, security disclosures, and customer conversations.
• Establish engineering standards for delivery, observability, incident response, scanner quality, and code quality.
• Contribute to GitLab’s transparent, async-first way of working through issues, merge requests, and the GitLab handbook.

Qualifications and requirements

• Experience leading engineering organizations with multiple teams and managers in a distributed environment.
• Strong understanding of application security fundamentals, including Static Application Security Testing, Software Composition Analysis, secret detection, vulnerability management workflows, and software supply chain security.
• Experience building detection, analysis, or scanning systems in a software as a service or DevSecOps environment, including trade-offs across precision, recall, latency, and scale.
• Direct experience shipping a customer-facing AI or machine learning product feature tied to detection or remediation quality outcomes.
• Ability to partner closely with product management on roadmap planning, prioritization, and requirements in a product-led context.
• Strong written communication skills and comfort leading through clear documentation in a remote, async-first organization.
• Collaborative leadership style that supports teams, gives direct feedback, and aligns with GitLab’s values.
• Familiarity with agentic AI systems, AI agent orchestration, threat intelligence research, or open source security tooling is useful, and we welcome candidates with adjacent or transferable experience.