Engineering Manager, Gitlab Delivery: Upgrades

An overview of this role

As the Engineering Manager, GitLab Delivery - Operate, you’ll guide a globally distributed team focused on making it easier for customers to deploy, upgrade, and run GitLab reliably in their own infrastructure. You’ll help shape the systems and tooling that support environments ranging from single-node virtual machines to large Kubernetes clusters, with a focus on reliability, operational simplicity, upgrade velocity, and zero-downtime capabilities across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed deployments. In this role, you’ll partner closely with a Product Manager and work across Infrastructure Platforms to connect customer needs and business goals with practical engineering choices.

This is a hands-on leadership opportunity for someone who wants to support a high-performing team while influencing how GitLab is delivered at scale. In your first year, you’ll help the team deliver better deployment and upgrade experiences, guide technical direction in areas like Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and cloud-native deployment architectures, and contribute to incident management to help support the availability of GitLab.com.

What you’ll do

• Guide a globally distributed engineering team and create an environment where team members can do strong work and grow in an all-remote, asynchronous setting.


• Hire onboard, and develop team members who align with GitLab’s values and contribute to an outcome-focused engineering organization.


• Manage and improve agile, asynchronous workflows so the team can deliver deployment tooling and services iteratively and reliably.


• Partner with Product Management and engineering peers across Infrastructure Platforms to align team priorities with customer needs and business goals.


• Own the reliability, upgrade experience, and operational simplicity of GitLab deployments across self-managed environments, GitLab.com, and GitLab Dedicated.


• Improve deployment patterns, observability, zero-downtime capabilities, and upgrade orchestration for customers running GitLab on their own infrastructure.


• Apply technical judgment in areas such as Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts, and stateful application delivery to guide choices and unblock the team.


• Participate in incident management and work with reliability and development teams to help maintain the availability of GitLab.com.

What you’ll bring

• Experience guiding deployment tooling, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering teams that operate at meaningful scale.


• Strong technical knowledge of Kubernetes Operators, Helm charts for stateful applications, and upgrade orchestration patterns.


• Familiarity with cloud-native deployment architectures, database lifecycle management, schema migrations, and zero-downtime upgrade strategies.


• Experience working on enterprise-scale or consumer-scale platforms, ideally in a product-focused software environment.


• Ability to investigate complex deployment and operational issues and explain tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.


• Experience building high-performing, distributed teams and supporting team members in an asynchronous, all-remote environment.


• Effective cross-functional skills across functions such as Infrastructure, Support, and Customer Success to improve customer outcomes.


• Openness to diverse paths into the role, including transferable skills, formal computer science education, or equivalent practical experience, along with interest in open source and developer tools.

About the team

The GitLab Delivery - Operate team is part of the Infrastructure Platforms department, which enables how GitLab operates, scales, and is delivered across GitLab.com, GitLab Dedicated, and self-managed offerings. We are a globally distributed team that owns deployment tooling and operational patterns to help customers run GitLab reliably on infrastructure ranging from virtual machines to Kubernetes clusters. We work asynchronously across regions and work closely with other Infrastructure teams, along with Support and Customer Success, to turn lessons from operating GitLab at scale into product and tooling improvements that benefit customers across all deployment models.