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Salary: USD 230,400 - 345,600 / annual
GitLab is seeking a Director of Engineering, Database Excellence to lead the Database Excellence stage, reporting to the Vice President of Data Engineering. This role owns the reliability, capacity, health, and sustainability of GitLab's application datastores across GitLab.com, self-managed GitLab, and GitLab Dedicated, with PostgreSQL as the primary focus alongside Redis, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, and object storage.
You will set the direction for database platform strategy and long-range plans aligned with company objectives. Key responsibilities include owning database capacity and availability outcomes for GitLab.com, communicating database risk to senior leadership, and guiding cross-division technical decisions in partnership with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps teams.
You will lead and coach three Engineering Managers while developing Staff-plus engineers into leaders. You own the hiring plan, organization design, retention, and performance management for teams across multiple regions. Additional responsibilities include partnering with Product to prioritize database platform investments, setting quarterly OKRs and KPIs for the stage, managing the database infrastructure budget with FinOps, serving as an escalation point for database incidents, and maintaining handbook documentation.
The Database Excellence organization includes three sub-teams: Database Architecture (providing datastore guidance and data growth controls), Database Automation (building PostgreSQL fleet automation and managed offerings), and Self Managed Database (rebuilding the upgrade and migration experience). Teams are distributed across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Experience leading managers of managers, including coaching newer managers
- Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL at scale (capacity planning, upgrades, replication, performance, large production clusters)
- Experience using data to make strategic technical decisions and connecting database platform investments with product outcomes
- Experience supporting software that customers run themselves or working through self-managed upgrade challenges
- Experience leading backend engineering teams that own production infrastructure with SRE practices (SLOs, on-call operations, incident management, cost management, automation)
- Strong written communication skills in asynchronous, handbook-first environments
- Experience leading globally distributed remote teams
- Plus: Redis, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, object storage, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, managed database services, FinOps, AI-assisted engineering workflows, or platform/infrastructure organization experience
