Senior Engineering Manager

Role overview

Join GitLab as a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a focused team of engineers responsible for the Pajamas Design System and the documentation platform. You’ll report to the Chief Design Officer and collaborate across GitLab, shaping engineering leadership and technical direction within a design organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a high-performing engineering team
• Drive architecture decisions and contribution workflow (how teams contribute and evolve the system)
• Define and build the engineering practice within Upstream Studios, ensuring alignment with company goals
• Partner with Product Design and Technical Writing to turn design and content needs into scalable technical solutions

Requirements

• Deep expertise in design systems, including:
  • design tokens
  • component architecture
  • accessibility standards
  • contribution models
• Experience building/supporting multi-lingual sites and localization workflows at scale
• Proven experience leading infrastructure/platform/development teams and building values-aligned, high-performing teams
• Professional experience with JavaScript and Vue.js, plus familiarity with:
  • Elasticsearch
  • Ruby/Go
  • AI tools
  • CI/CD practices
• Strong English communication skills for remote, largely asynchronous work
• Ability to diagnose and prevent performance/optimization issues
• Passion for open source and developer tools aligned with GitLab’s culture and expectations
• Strong foundation in scaling consumer-grade platforms with focus on reliability, security, performance, and scalability
• Experience with Git, docs-as-code, Hugo, accessibility, and building/maintaining a design system
• Comfort working in an agile, highly iterative development environment
• Ability to clearly communicate complex technical/architectural/organizational problems and propose iterative solutions

Nice to have

• Demonstrated ability to work effectively across multiple teams (Product Design, Technical Writing, and engineering)

Work model

• Full remote