Director of Engineering, Database Excellence

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software. * Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab. An overview of this role As Director of Engineering, Database Excellence, you will lead the Database Excellence stage and report to the Vice President of Data Engineering. You will set the direction for the databases that support GitLab.com, self-managed GitLab, and GitLab Dedicated. Your organization owns the reliability, capacity, health, and sustainability of GitLab's application datastores, with PostgreSQL as the primary focus alongside Redis, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, and object storage. You will be accountable for database capacity and availability on GitLab.com. You will guide long-range platform decisions while partnering with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps. The work includes reducing infrastructure costs, improving data growth controls and saturation detection, standardizing database services, rebuilding the self-managed upgrade experience, and contributing to GitLab's company-wide datastore strategy, including Cells partitioning. Learn more in the Database Excellence handbook . What you’ll do Set direction and long-range plans for the database platform in line with company strategy. Own database capacity and availability outcomes for GitLab.com, and communicate database risk to senior leadership. Lead and coach three Engineering Managers and develop Staff-plus engineers into leaders. Drive cross-division technical decisions using data, partnering with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps. Partner with Product to prioritize database platform investments and make infrastructure tradeoffs in the context of product outcomes. Own the hiring plan, organization design, retention, and performance management for teams across regions. Set quarterly objectives and key results and engineering key performance indicators for the stage, and manage the database infrastructure budget with FinOps. Serve as an escalation point for database incidents, standardize effective processes, and keep the handbook current. What you’ll bring Experience leading managers of managers, including coaching newer managers. Experience working hands-on with PostgreSQL at scale, including capacity planning, upgrades, replication, performance, and large production clusters. Experience using data to make strategic technical decisions and connect database platform investments and tradeoffs with product outcomes. Experience supporting software that customers run themselves, or working through the self-managed upgrade challenge. Experience leading backend engineering teams that own production infrastructure, applying site reliability engineering practices including service level objectives, on-call operations, incident management, cost management, and automation. Experience communicating clearly in writing in an asynchronous, handbook-first company. Experience leading globally distributed remote teams. Experience with Redis, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, object storage, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, managed database services, FinOps, AI-assisted engineering workflows, or platform and infrastructure organizations is a plus. About the team