Engineering Manager, Data Foundations

Overview

As Engineering Manager at Git Lab, 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 Git Lab.

We are looking for a leader who can leverage AI to drive non‑linear productivity gains across the platform and who has deep distributed systems knowledge, capable of steering both people and architecture of large‑scale data systems.

• Hire, manage, and enable a high‑performing Data Insights Platform engineering team, fostering an environment where team members deliver strong results.
• Partner closely with product managers, designers, and peer engineering managers to define and deliver the roadmap for the 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, scaling, failure recovery, and tenant isolation across SaaS, Dedicated, self‑managed, and Cells deployments.
• Help the team design safe and scalable integrations with the Git Lab 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, covering authentication, authorization, encryption, and safe handling of data with different privacy classifications.
• Improve operational maturity across the platform, focusing on observability, metrics, logging, readiness, capacity planning, performance monitoring, and runbooks for managed environments to enhance availability, throughput, latency, and recovery time.
• Collaborate asynchronously across teams and functions to deliver customer‑facing reporting capabilities on top of a 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.

• 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 judgment on service boundaries, asynchronous pipelines, back pressure, fault tolerance, horizontal scalability, and operating multi‑component systems in production.
• Strong technical background in backend and platform engineering, capable of guiding architecture for high‑throughput event pipelines and data systems.
• Experience with technologies and patterns 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 contributing technical guidance on complex architecture and delivery trade‑offs.
• 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 trade‑offs between , Dedicated, self‑managed, and cell‑based environments.
• Excellent written communication skills and 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.

In Data Foundations, we enable customers to self‑serve reporting with scalable architecture. Our vision is to build a comprehensive…