Engineering Manager, Cell Infrastructure

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 Manager / Senior Manager, Cell Infrastructure, you'll help shape the foundation that lets GitLab run reliably across multiple cloud providers in the agentic era. As more enterprise customers adopt AI-driven development workflows, GitLab needs a cell-based infrastructure that can scale horizontally, support strong reliability, and operate with clear cost efficiency. In this role, you'll report to the VP Engineering, Platform Scale & Architecture and lead a 0 to 1 effort to build the control layer that determines how GitLab cells are provisioned, placed, and operated across clouds. This is a high-impact leadership role where you'll define architecture as much as you'll deliver it. In your first year, you'll help establish the technical direction for multi-cloud cell infrastructure, build and grow the team based on level, and create the operational model for reliability, developer enablement, and cost visibility. You'll work across platform, infrastructure, CI/CD, and AI-related areas, including support for the Duo Agent Platform, to make sure the cellular substrate can meet GitLab's next stage of scale. What you’ll do - Lead the design and delivery of multi-cloud cell placement and orchestration systems that support GitLab's cell-based architecture. - Build and grow the engineering team responsible for cell infrastructure, spanning architecture, delivery, and production operations. - Drive infrastructure cost visibility and optimization by partnering with finance and platform teams to make unit economics part of the system design. - Own the reliability model for cell infrastructure, including on-call practices, incident response, and postmortem follow-through. - Partner with adjacent teams such as Git infrastructure, Artifact Registry, Duo Agent Platform, and CI/CD to support their scaling and deployment needs. - Define and evolve architectural decisions for cross-cloud routing, data residency, and infrastructure portability. - Develop platform capabilities and developer tooling that let teams deploy on top of cell infrastructure without needing to understand its internal complexity. - Represent the team in cross-functional planning with senior engineering stakeholders on GitLab's broader cells and multi-cloud strategy. What you’ll bring - Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production using cell-based architecture. - Operational ownership of highly reliable systems, including experience with on-call, incident management, and site reliability engineering practices. - Strong knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals such as consistency models, partitioning and sharding, failure modes, and multi-region or multi-cloud tradeoffs. - Experience leading engineering teams in a distributed environment, with scope aligned to either a single team or a broader multi-team organization. - Ability to hire, support, and develop engineers, including senior individual contributors and, at the senior manager level, engineering managers. - Experience building platform capabilities or developer tools that other engineering teams use to build and deploy software. - Comfort working in ambiguity and helping define direction in an early-stage build rather than stepping into a maintenance-focused role; transferable experience from comparable large-scale infrastructure, multi-cloud platforms, FinOps, AI-supporting systems, or major architecture transitions is welcome. - Clear cross-functional communication skills and the ability to work effectively with VP-level and CTO-level stakeholders. Ab