Senior Engineering Manager, Non-Linear Productivity

Responsibilities

Vision & Strategy

• Define and refine the operating model for a non-linear productivity pilot, including how friction is diagnosed and fixes are prioritized against MRPM, pipeline success rate, and pipeline latency.
• Identify and prioritize high-leverage productivity opportunities across the SDLC, including flaky tests, review latency, pipeline reliability, tooling gaps, and context loss for human and agentic contributors.
• Translate an ambiguous mandate into a concrete, time-boxed roadmap with milestones for a three-month pilot.

Team Building & Leadership

• Recruit and select four exceptional engineers for the pilot squad.
• Negotiate allocation models with engineers' current engineering managers.
• Set technical direction and working norms for a small, fast-moving team.
• Mentor engineers in root-cause diagnosis and shift-left thinking.

Technical Exploration & Experimentation

• Instrument and baseline MRPM, pipeline success rate, and pipeline latency.
• Diagnose high-leverage friction points and validate hypotheses with data.
• Design and implement compounding fixes, including shift-left quality improvements, tooling investments, and better context and interfaces for humans and agents.
• Review architecture, investigate pipeline internals, and unblock difficult technical problems.

Internal Adoption & Productivity

• Own high-impact friction areas from diagnosis through fix to measurable metric movement.
• Partner with affected engineering teams to drive trust, adoption, and durability.
• Report metric movement honestly, including unsuccessful bets.
• Codify reusable patterns and playbooks for organization-wide adoption.

Operations, Risk & Enablement

• Establish impact reporting for engineering managers and leadership, focused on metric movement.
• Ensure fixes degrade gracefully and do not introduce reliability risks into CI/CD systems.
• Define graduation criteria for the pilot and build an evidence-based case for or against a permanent function.

Requirements

• Track record leading small, high-autonomy engineering teams, ideally in developer productivity, CI/CD, platform, or infrastructure reliability.
• Deep familiarity with CI/CD and build systems, including pipeline flakiness, performance, success rates, and latency.
• Demonstrated root-cause orientation and a high bar for engineering talent.
• Comfort with metrics-driven accountability and transparent reporting.
• Strong executive-level communication.

Nice to Have

• Experience with agentic or AI-assisted development workflows.
• Experience running a defined-window pilot or 0-to-1 initiative with explicit success criteria.
• Familiarity with GitLab CI/CD internals or equivalent depth with a large-scale build and test system.

Compensation & Benefits

• United States base salary range: $190,000–$245,000 USD.
• Base salary excludes bonuses, equity, and benefits.
• Benefits include flexible paid time off, team member resource groups, equity compensation, an employee stock purchase plan, a growth and development fund, and parental leave.