Senior Director, Production and Tenant Platform Engineering

GitLab

Senior Director leading Production and Tenant Platform Engineering for GitLab's platform reliability and scalability. Managing engineering teams to support platform growth across SaaS and self-managed environments.

Posted 7/17/2026full-timeRemote • 🇨🇦 CanadaSenior💰 $168,000 - $285,600 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in leading large-scale engineering organizations and managing complex production systems, with a focus on operational excellence and strategic architectural judgment. Proven ability to drive initiatives that enhance system reliability and optimize infrastructure efficiency in a multi-tenant SaaS environment.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Executive Engineering LeadershipDeep Production ExpertisePlatform Engineering AcumenStrategic Architectural JudgmentChange Management

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Incident ManagementTraffic ManagementCapacity PlanningCloud InfrastructureKubernetesInfrastructure-as-CodeMulti-Tenant SaaSModular ServicesObservabilitySelf-Healing Frameworks

Soft Skills

CoachingCollaborationOwnershipAccountabilityChange Leadership

Tools & Technologies

GitLabOmnibusOAKCloud PlatformsContainerization

Industry Keywords

Production EngineeringPlatform ArchitectureOperational ExcellenceService-Level ReliabilityHigh-Scale Environments

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudDistributed SystemsKubernetes

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Lead a Unified Platform Strategy: Define and execute a cohesive roadmap that aligns Production Engineering (Fleet, Network, Cost, Responder) with Tenant Experience (Observability, Controls, Upgrade Tooling). Ensure these investments connect cleanly to support GitLab’s multi-tenant and self-managed reality.
Drive Operational Excellence & Reliability: Maintain deep accountability for GitLab’s production outcomes. You will oversee incident management, alert efficacy, and service-level reliability, ensuring that both GitLab.com and our global customer base benefit from a stable, high-performance platform.
Scale Engineering Leadership: Manage a senior management team, coaching them on performance, hiring, team structure, and execution. You will create the organizational conditions for success—defining clear mandates, removing blockers, and fostering a culture of ownership and accountability.
Evolve the Platform Architecture: Guide the technical evolution of the platform. This includes optimizing fleet management and cloud utilization, maturing our observability and self-healing frameworks, and delivering a modern upgrade experience that bridges the gap between legacy Omnibus and modern Kubernetes/cloud-native models.
Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Engineering Directors, Product Leaders, and Reliability/Delivery teams to ensure platform investments align with business priorities (e.g., AI roadmap, cost goals, deployment speed).
Translate Strategy into Execution: Convert broad organizational goals into actionable roadmaps. You will make tough trade-off decisions between immediate production stability and long-term architectural health, ensuring the team remains focused on outcomes that drive business value.
Build the Future of GitLab Operations: Champion initiatives that reduce operational toil, improve the developer/operator experience, and standardise platform interfaces across our modular service architecture.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Executive Engineering Leadership: Proven experience leading large, distributed engineering organizations (managing managers) within complex, high-scale platform environments.
Deep Production Expertise: A track record of owning critical production systems. You understand the realities of running distributed systems at scale, including incident response, traffic management, capacity planning, and cloud infrastructure costs.
Platform Engineering Acumen: Deep familiarity with large-scale distributed systems, along with various delivery models including containerized and Kubernetes-based platforms, infrastructure-as-code, and the operational challenges of supporting multi-tenant SaaS alongside diverse self-managed (Omnibus/OAK) deployments.
Strategic Architectural Judgment: Ability to evaluate complex technical trade-offs—such as build vs. buy, cloud-first vs. on-prem constraints, and architectural patterns for modular services—and provide clear, defensible direction.
Change Management: Experience leading teams through periods of significant growth, organizational change, or technical pivot (e.g., modernizing a monolith or scaling infrastructure for new product lines).
Commitment to GitLab Values: Strong alignment with our values of ownership, speed with quality, and customer outcomes.
Operational Focus: A proven ability to raise the bar on production quality. You have successfully led initiatives that measurably improved system reliability, reduced toil, or optimized infrastructure efficiency.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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