An overview of this role

As an Engineering Manager at GitLab, you see your team as your most valuable product. Your primary focus is on the people you lead—guiding them, nurturing their growth, and ensuring they have everything they need to succeed. While you're technically credible and understand the details of the work being done, your role is about empowering a world-class engineering team, fostering their health, and driving delivery on product commitments.

In this role, you will lead the Tenant Services, Geo team. Geo is a feature that replicates data from a GitLab instance to a warm-standby, used as a solution in data migrations and for disaster recovery. The Tenant Services Geo team will be responsible for supporting GitLab Dedicated customer migrations and Geo-related escalations across GitLab.com’s Dedicated offering, excluding FedRAMP environments. The team’s mandate spans the full Geo operational surface—pre- and post-cutover data hygiene, migration execution, and non-migration Geo escalations—working closely with the core Geo team, Dedicated migrations, and Support. The team will also contribute small fixes and improvements to Geo.

Challenges in this role include growing top-tier SRE talent in India, coordinating a shift and weekend coverage model for high-risk cutovers,, and ensuring high-quality execution of migrations that carry significant customer data and reputational risk. You’ll work closely with engineering leadership, the core Geo team, Dedicated migrations, Support, and backend/SRE engineers across Infrastructure.

Some examples of our focus areas:

• Standing up the Tenant Services, Geo shift model and rotation for Dedicated cutovers across EMEA and US hours.
• Evolving a retryable, low-risk cutover model for Dedicated migrations, in partnership with core Geo and Dedicated leadership.
• Reducing cutover duration to unlock more weekday migrations and improve team sustainability.
• Driving operational metrics like escalation absorption, internal escalation rate, cutover coverage, and response times.

What you’ll do

• Hire and manage a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers in India that lives our values.
• Hold regular 1:1s with all members of your team, providing coaching and regular feedback around the individual’s performance.
• Coordinate and continuously refine the team’s shift and weekend coverage model for Dedicated migrations.
• Own operational execution of Dedicated Geo migrations and cutovers, including planning, pre-cutover preparation, live execution, and post-cutover validation and cleanup.
• Ensure the team provides high-quality, timely responses to Geo-related escalations from Support and internal partners.
• Foster technical decision making on the team, stepping in to make final decisions when necessary—especially during high-stakes migrations or incidents.
• Build and maintain runbooks, guardrails, and post-cutover reviews so the team operates with rigor rather than improvisation, especially during ramp-up.
• Collaborate with core Geo, Dedicated migrations, and other Infrastructure teams to identify and prioritize engineering investments that improve migration tooling and processes.
• Define, track, and report on key operational metrics such as escalation volume absorbed, internal escalation rate, cutover coverage, response times, and team health signals, using them to drive continuous improvement.
• Participate in the Incident Management on-call rotation to help ensure availability goals for GitLab.com are met, working with reliability engineers and development team members.

What you’ll bring

• 3+ years of experience managing SRE, infrastructure, or platform engineering teams operating highly-available distributed systems at scale, ideally in a SaaS environment with customer-facing SLAs.
• Demonstrated ability to lead in a remote, high-performance environment, collaborating across multiple time zones and cultures.
• Experience running or significantly contributing to large-scale data migrations where customer data integrity and downtime risk must be carefully managed.
• Strong infrastructure background, including cloud platforms, observability, incident response, and distributed multi-tenant architectures.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts and risk trade-offs into clear, actionable insight for both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including customers.
• Strong problem-solving abilities and attention to detail, with a focus on delivering high-quality, low-risk operational outcomes in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Alignment with our company values and a commitment to working in accordance with those values.

It’s a Plus if You Have

• Experience working in or with managed/hosted environments similar to GitLab Dedicated, including regulated or compliance-sensitive customers (e.g., SOC2, ISO).
• Working knowledge of technologies commonly used in SRE and migration workflows (e.g., Kubernetes, Terraform, observability stacks, scripting languages).
• Used GitLab for personal or professional projects, and/or contributed to open source projects.
• Past experience working in an enterprise developer tools company or a high-growth infrastructure product company.