Engineering Manager, Cell Infrastructure

What you’ll do

• Lead the design and delivery of multi-cloud cell placement and orchestration systems that support GitLab's cell-based architecture.
• Build and grow the engineering team responsible for cell infrastructure, spanning architecture, delivery, and production operations.
• Drive infrastructure cost visibility and optimization by partnering with finance and platform teams to make unit economics part of the system design.
• Own the reliability model for cell infrastructure, including on-call practices, incident response, and postmortem follow-through.
• Partner with adjacent teams such as Git infrastructure, Artifact Registry, Duo Agent Platform, and CI/CD to support their scaling and deployment needs.
• Define and evolve architectural decisions for cross-cloud routing, data residency, and infrastructure portability.
• Develop platform capabilities and developer tooling that let teams deploy on top of cell infrastructure without needing to understand its internal complexity.
• Represent the team in cross-functional planning with senior engineering stakeholders on GitLab's broader cells and multi-cloud strategy.

What you’ll bring

• Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production using cell-based architecture.
• Operational ownership of highly reliable systems, including experience with on-call, incident management, and site reliability engineering practices.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals such as consistency models, partitioning and sharding, failure modes, and multi-region or multi-cloud tradeoffs.
• Experience leading engineering teams in a distributed environment, with scope aligned to either a single team or a broader multi-team organization.
• Ability to hire, support, and develop engineers, including senior individual contributors and, at the senior manager level, engineering managers.
• Experience building platform capabilities or developer tools that other engineering teams use to build and deploy software.
• Comfort working in ambiguity and helping define direction in an early-stage build rather than stepping into a maintenance-focused role; transferable experience from comparable large-scale infrastructure, multi-cloud platforms, FinOps, AI-supporting systems, or major architecture transitions is welcome.
• Clear cross-functional communication skills and the ability to work effectively with VP-level and CTO-level stakeholders.