# Director of Engineering, Organizations & Cells

**Company:** [GitLab](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/gitlab)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Distributed Systems, Multi-Tenant Saas, Database Sharding, Database Replication, Data Migration, Request Routing, Multi-Cloud Infrastructure, Multi-Region Architecture, Incident Command, Capacity Planning, AI Tools
**Posted:** 2026-08-13

> Leads the engineering organization responsible for scaling GitLab.com through cell-based architecture, customer migrations, routing, and multi-cloud infrastructure. The role requires director-level people leadership, distributed-systems expertise, large-scale database and migration experience, and strong asynchronous communication.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Deliver the Cells and Organizations roadmap, including cell provisioning and lifecycle, routing and topology, organization data migration tooling, and platform feature parity.
- Execute cohort-based customer Organization migrations onto cells with zero data loss, verified rollback, and no downtime outside the tenant in flight.
- Shape a multi-cloud, multi-region cell footprint and decide what remains cell-local versus what crosses boundaries.
- Build and lead the engineering organization by hiring, leveling, and developing managers and senior individual contributors across several teams.
- Set the technical bar and operating cadence.
- Drive commitments and sequencing with peer engineering leaders, Product, Infrastructure, and Security across time zones and asynchronously.

## Success Measures
- Customer Organizations running on cells in production, migrated cleanly and on schedule.
- Availability and latency improvements from isolation and load distribution.
- Infrastructure cost per unit of capacity declining as the footprint grows.
- Throughput and retention of the teams built.

## Requirements
- Experience leading multiple teams through managers, roughly 25–60 engineers, including hiring and developing managers.
- Track record of shipping multi-quarter infrastructure programs with hard external dependencies.
- Ability to operate as a peer to VPs and staff-plus engineers, make architectural decisions on technical merit, and adapt based on evidence.
- Strong written communication for a remote, asynchronous work environment.
- Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, such as multi-tenant SaaS, sharded or cell-based architectures, control planes, or data platforms at comparable scale.
- Working fluency in relational database scaling, including partitioning, sharding, replication, large-scale data migration, and request routing.
- Operational experience with incident command, capacity planning, and blast-radius containment.
- Deep cloud infrastructure experience with at least one major provider, ideally more than one.
- Understanding of how agentic access patterns affect platform read volume, concurrency, and authorization models.
- Experience using AI tooling in engineering practice and raising its adoption across a team.

## Benefits
- Flexible paid time off
- Team member resource groups
- Equity compensation and employee stock purchase plan
- Growth and development fund
- Parental leave

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