Engineering Manager, Cell Infrastructure

Role overview

As Engineering Manager / Senior Manager, Cell Infrastructure (reporting to the VP Engineering, Platform Scale & Architecture), you will shape the foundation that lets GitLab run reliably across multiple cloud providers. You’ll lead a 0→1 effort to build the control layer that determines how GitLab cells are provisioned, placed, and operated across clouds.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of multi-cloud cell placement and orchestration systems for GitLab’s cell-based architecture.
• Build and grow the engineering team for cell infrastructure (architecture, delivery, production operations) and set the technical direction.
• Drive infrastructure cost visibility and optimization, partnering with finance and platform teams to incorporate unit economics into system design.
• Own the reliability model for cell infrastructure, including:
  • on-call practices
  • incident response
  • postmortem follow-through
• Partner with adjacent teams (e.g., Git infrastructure, Artifact Registry, Duo Agent Platform, CI/CD) to support their scaling and deployment needs.
• Define and evolve architecture decisions for:
  • cross-cloud routing
  • data residency
  • infrastructure portability
• Build platform capabilities and developer tooling so teams can deploy on cell infrastructure without needing internal complexity.
• Represent the team in cross-functional planning around GitLab’s broader cells and multi-cloud strategy.

Requirements (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 on-call, incident management, and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including consistency models (text is truncated in the posting but indicates deep distributed systems knowledge).