Director of Engineering, Workflows & Runners

Company: GitLab

Job Category: Engineering Leadership / Platform / Distributed Systems

Contract Type: Full-Time, Permanent

Location: Remote — USA or Canada

Salary: $230,000–$285,000 base (US) + equity + benefits

Application Link: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/8537864002

Posted: May 11, 2026 (marked "New" on Greenhouse)

Job Description: You'll own the technical vision and delivery for GitLab's core Workflow and Function Runtime primitives — the shared infrastructure used across dozens of product groups. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll actively engage with architecture and code, manage multiple engineering teams, and drive operational excellence for mission-critical services.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own technical vision and roadmap for core Workflow and Function Runtime primitives in partnership with Product, Architecture, and platform teams
• Lead and grow multiple engineering teams responsible for highly available, horizontally scalable, secure distributed systems
• Be hands-on with architecture and code — review designs, dive into incidents, contribute to critical paths
• Drive operational excellence including SLOs, on-call, incident response, capacity planning, and cross-region resilience
• Optimize for cost and efficiency at scale — balancing performance, reliability, and unit economics
• Define and mature platform APIs and abstractions that allow product teams to compose workflows and schedule functions safely
• Recruit, develop, and retain senior and staff-level engineers and managers

Requirements:

• Proven experience leading teams building core platform or infrastructure services (workflow engines, function runtimes, control planes, high-scale microservices, or similar)
• Hands-on engineering leadership track record — you've meaningfully contributed to architecture and are comfortable reading/writing code to unblock or clarify
• Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems (service decomposition, data partitioning, fault tolerance, backpressure)
• Experience operating mission-critical services in production (SLOs, on-call, incident management, chaos/DR testing)
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), and event-driven/async architectures
• 10+ years professional software engineering; 4–6+ years in engineering leadership managing managers and senior/staff engineers

Benefits: Flexible PTO, equity compensation, Growth and Development Fund, parental leave, home office support.