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Salary: USD 168,000 - 285,600 / annual
GitLab is seeking a Director of Financial Planning & Analysis to lead finance for the Research & Development organization, the company's largest operating expense area. You will serve as the strategic finance partner to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and their leadership team, owning R&D planning, forecasting, and investment decisions for the platform used by more than 100,000 organizations.
In this role, you will sit at the CTO's staff table, shape GitLab's long-range plan, and help leadership decide where to invest next. Key responsibilities include:
• Serve as the primary finance advisor to the CTO and R&D leadership, holding partners accountable for execution against plan and connecting R&D priorities to company financial targets.
• Lead annual planning and rolling forecasts for R&D, owning the operating plan across headcount, compensation, contractors, hosting and cloud, AI and LLM costs, software, and tooling.
• Build frameworks that connect R&D investment to product roadmap outcomes. Evaluate business cases for new initiatives, AI capabilities, build-versus-buy decisions, and vendor commitments, presenting risks and opportunities to leadership.
• Define and track R&D efficiency metrics including R&D spend as a percentage of revenue, cost per engineer, hosting cost per user, and AI inference cost per feature. Identify large-scale savings and reallocation opportunities and drive them to completion.
• Partner with People and R&D leaders on hiring plans, location strategy, and organizational design. Keep headcount forecasts accurate and reconciled to actuals.
• Lead the AI transformation of R&D finance by rethinking planning, forecasting, and reporting workflows, using AI tools to make them faster, more accurate, and more insightful.
• Redesign FP&A processes, policies, and planning and reporting systems for efficiency and effectiveness with AI at the center. Work with Accounting on capitalized software, accruals, and allocations, and with Procurement on process improvements.
• Lead and develop your R&D finance team: hire and coach team members, set goals and priorities, and provide expert feedback. Practice GitLab's values through handbook-first, asynchronous collaboration across time zones.
GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and over 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab.
REQUIREMENTS:
• Extensive finance experience, including serving as the lead finance partner to an R&D, Engineering, or Product organization, plus experience leading a team of analysts.
• Strong understanding of financial statements, accounting principles, and R&D cost drivers, including engineering headcount, cloud hosting, AI and LLM usage, software licenses, and capitalized software development.
• Experience leading process redesign and change in a finance team, including hands-on use of AI tools to improve how work gets done.
• Expertise in influencing senior technical stakeholders and translating complex analysis into clear recommendations for executives.
• Advanced financial modeling skills following industry best practices, expertise in Google Sheets, and hands-on experience with financial and data visualization tools (note: Google Sheets is used instead of Excel for modeling).
• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or a related field.
• Comfort working remotely and asynchronously, and the ability to use GitLab.
• Preferred: Enterprise SaaS finance experience, direct CTO partnership, experience with NetSuite, Sisense, Adaptive Planning, or SQL, or an MBA, CFA, or CPA qualification.
