Senior People Business Partner

An overview of this role

As the Senior People Business Partners, Engineering, you'll be a strategic partner to engineering leaders, VPlevel, helping them navigate change, mature their organizations, and build a healthy, high-performance culture. You'll focus on engineering-specific challenges such as evolving job architecture and leveling, supporting leadership transitions at the executive level, and driving consistency in how we develop, calibrate, and grow engineering talent across distributed teams. In this role, you'll work on a global scale, with a particular focus on supporting leaders globally, and you'll play a key part in making complex transformations feel clear and manageable for both leaders and their teams.

You’ll report into the PBP organization and work closely with peers like current and former Engineering PBPs to shape how GitLab’s engineering function operates as we continue to grow. You’ll be expected to quickly build trust with senior engineering leaders, lean into engineering-wide processes like calibrations and offsites, and help bring cohesion to a leadership team that spans tenured GitLab team members and newer leaders. This is a good fit if you enjoy working in a fast-paced tech environment, are comfortable with ambiguity and change, and want to make a visible impact on how engineering teams are structured, supported, and set up to deliver results.

What You’ll Do  

• Partner with senior engineering leaders, including VPs, to understand their organizations, priorities, and challenges, and translate these into clear people and business priorities.
• Drive and support job architecture changes in Engineering, including the introduction of new levels, to help leaders adopt and mature consistent role expectations and career paths.
• Lead and facilitate key Engineering people processes, such as calibrations, in close partnership with the PBP team and cross-functional partners like Talent Management.
• Advise and coach engineering leaders on topics such as organization design, change management, and navigating global teams, including EMEA considerations.
• Work closely with other PBPs and Talent partners to share insights, align on approach, and ensure a consistent, high-quality experience for Engineering leaders and their teams.
• Use data and qualitative feedback to identify trends in the Engineering organization and recommend actions that improve effectiveness, engagement, and performance.
• Support planning and execution of Engineering offsites and other key forums so leaders can align on priorities, make decisions, and move work forward efficiently.

What You’ll Bring 

• Experience as a People Business Partner or similar role supporting engineering or technical organizations, ideally with exposure to fast-paced tech environments of comparable size and complexity.
• Background working with senior leaders, including Senior Directors and Vice Presidents, with the ability to build trusted relationships, influence decision-making, and provide clear, data-informed guidance.
• Experience supporting globally distributed teams, including familiarity with working across multiple regions and time zones and navigating regional differences such as those in EMEA.
• Comfort operating in periods of organizational change or transformation, such as job architecture updates, leadership transitions, or shifts in team structure and culture, while balancing strategic work (for example, organizational design, leadership effectiveness, and culture initiatives) with hands-on execution of core People processes.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including working asynchronously and partnering cross-functionally with Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards, and other People teams.
• Openness to learning GitLab’s ways of working and applying transferable experience from related domains (such as product or IT) while developing a deeper understanding of engineering needs.

About the team

The Engineering People Business Partner (PBP) team supports GitLab's Engineering teams globally, to build a high-performing, scalable, and globally distributed organization. You'll partner closely with senior leaders on these teams, whose members are based across the US and EMEA. You'll also collaborate asynchronously with other PBPs, Talent Management, and cross-functional partners to support organization design, performance and calibration processes, and ongoing culture and leadership development. The team is focused on maturing Engineering's people practices, creating cohesion across leaders who are at different stages in their GitLab journey, and helping the organization navigate major transformations in structure, ways of working, and leadership.

You can expect quarterly travel for Engineering and PBP offsites and collaborative forums. This role also requires significant working hours overlap with US Central or East Coast time zones to support the team's global operations across multiple time zones. Candidates based in other locations who can accommodate these hours are welcome to apply.