Director of Engineering, Security Risk Management

An overview of this role

We're seeking an exceptional Engineering Lead to drive the evolution of GitLab's Security Risk Management (SRM) stage into a world-class platform for vulnerability analysis and remediation at enterprise scale. This is a rare opportunity to architect and build distributed systems that will fundamentally change how large organizations approach application security and developer security workflows.

As the SRM Stage Lead, you'll be responsible for transforming our engineering culture toward high-performance distributed systems while delivering an exceptional user experience for both Application Security professionals and Developers. You'll own the technical strategy for processing, analyzing, and remediating vulnerabilities across massive codebases and complex enterprise environments.

What You’ll Do  

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Design distributed systems architecture capable of processing vulnerability data from thousands of repositories, millions of commits, and complex dependency graphs in real-time
• Drive storage system decisions for multi-petabyte security datasets, balancing query performance, cost efficiency, and data retention requirements across time-series, graph, and document storage paradigms
• Architect scalable analysis pipelines that can ingest vulnerability feeds, correlate findings across multiple security tools, and provide actionable intelligence to both security teams and individual developers
• Lead the technical evolution from monolithic security scanning to microservices-based, event-driven vulnerability management systems

Engineering Culture Transformation

• Champion high-performance systems thinking throughout the team, establishing patterns for horizontal scaling, efficient resource utilization, and fault-tolerant distributed computing
• Establish technical standards for system observability, chaos engineering, and performance optimization in security-critical systems
• Mentor and develop senior engineers in distributed systems design, database optimization, and large-scale system architecture
• Drive architectural decision records (ADRs) for major technical decisions, particularly around data storage, processing frameworks, and system boundaries

Product & User Experience Excellence

• Own the end-to-end user journey (in partnership with PM) for both AppSec professionals managing enterprise-wide risk and developers receiving actionable security feedback in their workflow
• Design APIs and interfaces that abstract complexity while providing the power and flexibility that security professionals demand
• Collaborate with Product Management, UX and Product Design to translate complex technical capabilities into intuitive user experiences
• Establish feedback loops with large enterprise customers to ensure our technical solutions scale with their organizational complexity

Strategic Technical Execution

• Evaluate and integrate cutting-edge technologies in areas such as graph databases, stream processing, machine learning inference at scale, and distributed caching, in collaboration with GitLab’s Infrastructure, Data and AI teams
• Own the technical roadmap for vulnerability correlation, risk scoring, and automated remediation workflows
• Drive partnerships with other GitLab stages to ensure seamless integration across the DevSecOps platform
• Lead incident response for availability and performance issues in customer-facing security systems

What You’ll Bring 

Technical Expertise

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years leading distributed systems at scale (>100M daily operations)
• Deep expertise in designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems with complex data models
• Proven experience with polyglot persistence strategies, including relational databases (PostgreSQL, Cloud Spanner), time-series databases, graph databases, and distributed key-value stores
• Strong background in stream processing frameworks (Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or similar) and event-driven architectures
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and cloud-native observability stacks
• Security domain knowledge with understanding of vulnerability assessment, static analysis, dependency scanning, or application security testing

Leadership & Communication

• Proven track record of leading and growing high-performing engineering teams (40+ engineers)
• Experience transforming engineering culture and establishing technical excellence standards in fast-growing organizations
• Strong technical communication skills with ability to present complex architectural decisions to executive stakeholders
• Collaborative leadership style with experience working across multiple engineering teams and product stakeholders

Problem-Solving & Innovation

• Systems thinking approach to complex technical problems with demonstrated ability to make appropriate trade-offs between performance, scalability, and maintainability
• Experience with A/B testing frameworks and data-driven decision making in technical contexts
• Track record of successfully delivering large-scale technical migrations or architectural transformations
• Startup or high-growth company experience with ability to balance technical debt with rapid feature delivery

About the team

Security Risk Management sits at the heart of modern DevSecOps. The systems you build will directly impact how Fortune 500 companies protect their applications and how millions of developers integrate security into their daily workflow. You'll have the opportunity to define the future of application security tooling while working with some of the most challenging distributed systems problems in the industry.

The Technical Challenge

You'll be solving some of the most interesting distributed systems problems in the security space:

• Scale: Processing vulnerability data for organizations with 100,000+ repositories and millions of developers
• Performance: Sub-second query response times for complex security analytics across massive datasets
• Reliability: 99.95%+ uptime SLAs for security-critical workflows that can't afford downtime
• Complexity: Correlating findings across 20+ different security tools while maintaining data lineage and audit trails
• User Experience: Making complex security data accessible to both security experts and developers with varying security expertise