Director of Engineering, Database Excellence

Remote · United States of America · USD 230,400-345,600 · Remote · Posted Sep 29, 2026

At a glance

As Director of Engineering, Database Excellence, you will lead the Database Excellence stage and report to the Vice President of Data Engineering.
You will set the direction for the databases that support GitLab.com, self-managed GitLab, and GitLab Dedicated.
Your organization owns the reliability, capacity, health, and sustainability of GitLab's application datastores, with PostgreSQL as the primary focus alongside Redis, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, and object storage.

Set direction and long-range plans for the database platform in line with company strategy.
Own database capacity and availability outcomes for GitLab.com, and communicate database risk to senior leadership.
Lead and coach three Engineering Managers and develop Staff-plus engineers into leaders.
Drive cross-division technical decisions using data, partnering with Infrastructure, Product, Distribution, Support, Security, and FinOps.
Partner with Product to prioritize database platform investments and make infrastructure tradeoffs in the context of product outcomes.
Own the hiring plan, organization design, retention, and performance management for teams across regions.
Set quarterly objectives and key results and engineering key performance indicators for the stage, and manage the database infrastructure budget with FinOps.
Serve as an escalation point for database incidents, standardize effective processes, and keep the handbook current.

Experience leading managers of managers, including coaching newer managers.
Experience working hands-on with PostgreSQL at scale, including capacity planning, upgrades, replication, performance, and large production clusters.
Experience using data to make strategic technical decisions and connect database platform investments and tradeoffs with product outcomes.
Experience supporting software that customers run themselves, or working through the self-managed upgrade challenge.
Experience leading backend engineering teams that own production infrastructure, applying site reliability engineering practices including service level objectives, on-call operations, incident management, cost management, and automation.
Experience communicating clearly in writing in an asynchronous, handbook-first company.
Experience leading globally distributed remote teams.

Experience with Redis, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, object storage, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, managed database services, FinOps, AI-assisted engineering workflows, or platform and infrastructure organizations is a plus.