Director of Engineering, Workflows & Runners

Location: Remote, Canada; Remote, US

Department: Architecture Engineering

About the Role

We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the teams building the core primitives for Workflows and Function Runtime at GitLab. You will own the strategy, architecture, and delivery of scalable, multi-tenant, and cost-efficient distributed systems that become shared infrastructure for many product groups across GitLab.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll work directly with senior and principal engineers on design and technical decisions, while also building and scaling a high-performing, values-aligned engineering organization.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical vision and roadmap for GitLab’s core Workflow and Function Runtime primitives, in partnership with Product, Architecture, and other platform teams.
• Lead and grow multiple engineering teams responsible for highly available, horizontally scalable, and secure distributed systems used across GitLab.
• Be hands-on with architecture and code: review designs, dive into incidents, and contribute to critical paths where needed.
• Drive operational excellence for these shared services, including SLOs, on-call, incident response, capacity planning, and resilience across regions and tenants.
• Optimize for cost and efficiency at scale, balancing performance, reliability, and unit economics for long-running and bursty workloads.
• Define and mature platform APIs and abstractions that allow product teams to compose workflows, schedule functions, and integrate with the runtime safely and predictably.
• Create a strong engineering culture focused on results, iteration, ownership, and rigorous technical judgment.
• Collaborate across the company (Product Management, Security, Infrastructure, Data, AI/ML, and other stage groups) to ensure the platform primitives meet the needs of diverse workloads.
• Recruit, develop, and retain senior and staff-level engineers and managers; provide clear expectations, feedback, and growth paths.
• Champion GitLab values (results, transparency, efficiency, collaboration, diversity & inclusion) in how the team plans, executes, and communicates.

What You’ll Bring

• Proven experience leading teams building core platform or infrastructure services (e.g., workflow engines, function runtimes, control planes, high-scale microservices, or similar distributed systems).
• Track record as a hands-on engineering leader: you’ve meaningfully contributed to architecture and design, and you are comfortable reading/writing code to unblock or clarify.
• Strong background in scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems, including topics such as service decomposition, data partitioning, fault tolerance, and backpressure.
• Demonstrated success operating mission-critical services in production (SLOs, on-call, incident management, postmortems, capacity management, chaos/DR testing).
• Experience driving cost efficiency in cloud-native environments (profiling, performance tuning, right-sizing, storage and network optimization, and thoughtful use of managed services).
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), and event-driven/async architectures; experience with function-as-a-service or serverless runtimes is a plus.
• People leadership experience managing managers and senior/staff engineers, with a record of hiring, coaching, and building inclusive, high-trust teams.
• Ability to work effectively in a fully remote, globally distributed organization, with excellent written and asynchronous communication skills.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4–6+ years in engineering leadership (multi-team or org-level scope).