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GitLab is seeking an Engineering Manager for Database Change Management to lead a distributed backend engineering team in the Database Excellence stage. The team owns database health and the database upgrade experience across GitLab.com and self-managed deployments, managing one of the largest PostgreSQL installations in the world.
You will guide two concurrent missions: maintaining database capacity limits and delivering a multi-year replacement of GitLab's database migration system to make customer upgrades faster and safer. You'll report to the Database Excellence stage's engineering leader and build a new engineering cluster based in India while maintaining production health through asynchronous, handbook-first practices.
Key responsibilities include leading a distributed backend engineering team working fully asynchronously across time zones; hiring, onboarding, and developing an India-based engineering cluster including intermediate engineers and a senior technical anchor; balancing database health responsibilities with the multi-quarter migration system replacement; protecting the replatforming program's critical path while meeting operational commitments; coaching engineers from intermediate through senior levels; running the team async-first through written decision records and visible priorities; partnering with Distribution, QA, database framework teams, and infrastructure leadership; and representing the team's capacity, priorities, risks, and delivery status to senior engineering leadership.
You should bring engineering management experience leading remote, distributed teams across many time zones with minimal working hour overlap; production PostgreSQL experience including capacity planning and technical depth to contribute credibly to migration system and reliability design discussions; and the ability to balance long-horizon platform programs with immediate operational needs.
