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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Engineering Manager, Data Foundations - **Company:** GitLab - **Location:** United States (Remote available) - **Salary:** $152,800.0 - $259,200.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Systems Engineering, Software as a Service, Data Infrastructure, Data Stores, Data Systems, Distributed Data Store, Distributed Systems, Fault Tolerance, Protocol Buffers, Enterprise Messaging Systems, Online Analytical Processing, Search Technologies, Data Streaming, Systems Integration, Data Logging, Change Data Capture, Indexer, Backend, Gitlab, Data Analytics, Performance Monitor, Data Management, Vertica, Api Management - **Published:** September 4, 2026 - **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/engineering-manager-data-foundations-gitlab-9703759 ## About the Role * Experience managing platform, infrastructure, or data systems teams at scale, with a track record of building high-performing, values-aligned teams. * Deep distributed systems expertise, including strong judgment on service boundaries, asynchronous pipelines, backpressure, fault tolerance, horizontal scalability, and operating multi-component systems in production. * Strong technical background in backend and platform engineering, with the ability to guide architecture for high-throughput event pipelines and data systems. * Experience with technologies and patterns relevant to this space, such as change data capture, event streaming or messaging systems, OLAP data stores, query-serving layers, and service-to-service APIs. * Ability to hire, develop, and coach team members while still contributing technical guidance on complex architecture and delivery tradeoffs. * Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, especially when ownership is split between platform teams and feature teams consuming common infrastructure or APIs. * Experience building or operating systems across multiple deployment models, with sound judgment about the tradeoffs between GitLab.com, Dedicated, self-managed, and cell-based environments. * Strong written communication skills and the ability to work effectively in an all-remote, asynchronous environment. * Familiarity with search, indexing, and query-serving systems is a strong plus. * A deep passion for reliability, customer outcomes, and engineering and operational excellence, with a proven track record of instilling these values in high-performing teams. ## Description As Engineering Manager at GitLab, you'll manage and grow a high-performing engineering team within the Data Foundations group, working on a core data platform that ingests, processes, persists, and queries data streams generated across GitLab. We are looking for a leader who can leverage AI to drive non-linear productivity gains across the platform, accelerating our ability to deliver value to our customers. We're looking for someone with deep distributed systems knowledge. You'll need to be comfortable going well beyond people management and into the architecture of high-throughput, multi-component data systems: ingestion, buffering, enrichment, replication, storage, querying, backpressure handling, isolation, and production operations across multiple deployment models. You'll partner closely with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Data, and other Engineering teams to evolve a platform that lives inside the product, keeps external services to a minimum, and runs across GitLab.com, Dedicated, Self-Managed, and Cells-based deployments. In addition to Data Insights Platform, this role will take on classic search scope as the team joins the Data Foundations organization. You'll help lead architecture and execution across both GitLab's analytics platform and classic search capabilities, balancing platform depth with customer-facing impact. You'll help lead architecture and execution across both GitLab's analytics platform and classic search capabilities, balancing platform depth with customer-facing impact. In this role, you'll balance technical guidance with people management. You'll hire, coach, and develop engineers while also helping drive architecture and execution across a platform built around stateless ingesters, Siphon CDC replication, NATS/JetStream buffering, enrichment pipelines, ClickHouse-backed storage, and a Query API that interfaces with the GitLab Rails monolith. In Data Foundations, we build the engineering systems that make platform data reliable, scalable, and available to product teams across GitLab, and you'll help guide that work. What you'll do * Hire, manage, and enable a high-performing Data Insights Platform engineering team, creating an environment where team members can do their best work and deliver strong results. * Partner closely with product managers, product designers, and peer engineering managers to define and deliver the roadmap for Data Insights Platform (DIP) and related Platform Insights initiatives such as Siphon, Query API integrations, classic search initiatives, and self-service reporting foundations. * Own delivery for your team, including planning, prioritization, execution, and operational follow-through across architecture work, platform improvements, and production readiness, with clear accountability for roadmap milestones and delivery outcomes. * Guide the technical design of distributed data-path components, including ingestion, buffering, enrichment, exporting, and querying, and shape architecture choices on sharding, partitioning, component-specific scaling, failure recovery, and tenant isolation across SaaS, Dedicated, self-managed, and Cells deployments, with a strong focus on reliability, throughput, operability, and maintainability. * Help the team design safe and scalable integrations with the GitLab monolith, including gRPC/Protobuf-based query paths and clear ownership boundaries between DIP and product teams building user-facing GraphQL or REST endpoints. * Drive a high bar for security, privacy, and governance in how platform data is handled, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and safe handling of data with different privacy classifications. * Improve operational maturity across the platform, including observability, metrics, logging, readiness, capacity planning, performance monitoring, and clear runbooks for managed environments, with a focus on improving availability, throughput, latency, and time to recovery. * Collaborate asynchronously across teams and functions to help GitLab land customer-facing reporting capabilities on top of a strong, scalable data foundation. * Lead the design and evolution of the platform with a focus on modular architecture, ensuring systems are extensible and ready for AI-driven integrations., The base salary range for this role's listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary. 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