Director of Engineering, Workflows & Runners

The role

This director position heads the teams creating GitLab's foundational Workflow and Function Runtime layers, which many product groups rely on. The leader sets technical direction, scales the organization, and stays close to architecture and code alongside senior and principal engineers. The role is fully remote and partners with Product, Security, Infrastructure, Data, and AI/ML groups.

What you would do

• Set the technical direction and roadmap for the workflow and function execution foundations together with Product and Architecture partners
• Lead and expand several teams delivering secure, highly available, horizontally scalable distributed services
• Stay involved in design reviews, incident investigations, and occasional work on critical code paths
• Run reliability practices for shared services such as SLOs, on-call rotations, incident handling, capacity planning, and multi-region resilience
• Balance performance, dependability, and unit costs for both steady and spiky workloads
• Shape platform APIs and abstractions so product teams can safely build workflows and schedule functions
• Work with Product Management, Security, Infrastructure, Data, and AI/ML to meet varied workload needs
• Hire, coach, and retain senior engineers, staff engineers, and managers while fostering a results-driven culture

What they asked for

• History of leading teams that build core platform or infrastructure services like workflow engines, control planes, or large-scale microservices
• Hands-on leadership record, with real contributions to architecture and willingness to read and write code
• Solid grounding in multi-tenant distributed system design, including partitioning, fault tolerance, and backpressure
• Proven operation of business-critical production services, including incident reviews, capacity management, and chaos or disaster recovery exercises
• Experience lowering cloud-native costs through profiling, tuning, right-sizing, and storage and network optimization
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, or Azure, and event-driven asynchronous designs
• Experience managing managers and senior or staff engineers, with a record of hiring and building inclusive teams
• At least 10 years in software engineering, including roughly 4 to 6 or more years leading multiple teams or an organization
• Strong written and asynchronous communication in a distributed, fully remote company

Nice to have

• Background with serverless platforms or running code as on-demand functions