Director of Engineering, Organizations & Cells
RemoteIndia
Job Summary
Lead the engineering organization for GitLab.com's cellular architecture, driving roadmap delivery for cell provisioning, lifecycle management, and organization data migration tooling. Execute cohort-based customer migrations with zero data loss, verified rollbacks, and no tenant downtime while establishing multi-cloud, multi-region footprints and architectural boundaries for data residency and regional control. Hire, level, and develop managers and senior ICs across several teams, setting technical standards and operating cadence for a distributed, asynchronous environment. Collaborate with peer engineering leaders, Product, Infrastructure, and Security to drive commitments and sequencing across time zones, targeting a 100x increase in headroom for the platform.
Required Qualifications
- Engineering leadership at director scale
- Experience leading multiple teams through managers (roughly 25–60 engineers), including hiring and developing managers
- A track record of shipping multi-quarter infrastructure programs with hard external dependencies
- Comfort operating as a peer to VPs and staff-plus engineers
- Strong written communication
- Distributed systems depth
- Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production — multi-tenant SaaS, sharded or cell-based architectures, control planes, or data platforms at comparable scale
- Working fluency in relational database scaling (partitioning, sharding, replication), data migration at scale, and request routing
- Real operational experience: incident command, capacity planning, and designing for blast-radius containment
- Cloud infrastructure at depth on at least one major provider, ideally more than one
- AI-native engineering
- Understanding of what agentic access patterns do to a platform's read volume, concurrency, and authorization model, and designing for that rather than retrofitting it
- Use of AI tooling in own engineering practice and raising the bar for it across a team
- Ability to drive commitments and sequencing with peer engineering leaders, Product, Infrastructure, and Security
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with multi-cloud, multi-region cell footprints
- Experience with zero data loss migrations and verified rollbacks
- Experience with tenant-level policy enforcement and data residency
- Experience with asynchronous cross-timezone collaboration
- Experience with public issues and merge requests for technical communication
- Experience with sharded or cell-based architectures
- Experience with control planes
- Experience with data platforms at comparable scale
- Experience with incident command
- Experience with capacity planning
- Experience with designing for blast-radius containment
- Experience with cloud infrastructure on more than one major provider
- Experience with agentic access patterns
- Experience with raising the bar for AI tooling across a team
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