Senior Engineering Manager, Non-Linear Productivity

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, enabling organizations to enhance developer productivity and operational efficiency. The Senior Engineering Manager will focus on driving non-linear productivity by building a team to identify and resolve friction points in GitLab's software development lifecycle.

Responsibilities:

• Define and continuously refine the operating model for the non-linear productivity pilot: what 'friction' means, how it's diagnosed, and how fixes are prioritized against the three system-level metrics
• Identify and prioritize non-linear productivity opportunities (step-change fixes rather than incremental gains) across the SDLC, including flaky tests, review latency, pipeline reliability, tooling gaps, and context loss for both human and agentic contributors
• Translate an intentionally broad, ambiguous mandate ('find the friction, fix it at the root') into a concrete, time-boxed roadmap with defined milestones for a 3-month pilot window
• Personally source, evaluate, and select 4 exceptional engineers for the pilot squad. You own this hiring bar directly rather than delegating it to a pipeline
• Negotiate allocation models (100% vs. partial/dual-hat) with each engineer's current EM, balancing team commitments against the pilot's needs
• Set the technical direction and working norms for a small, fast-moving team: how work is scoped, how decisions get made, and how progress gets reported
• Mentor the engineers on this team in root-cause diagnosis and shift-left thinking, raising the bar for rigor versus reaching for the nearest patch
• Lead hands-on investigation to instrument and baseline the three top-level metrics (MRPM, pipeline success rate, pipeline latency) so the org has an honest starting point before any fix is proposed
• Diagnose the highest-leverage friction points dragging each metric down, and validate hypotheses with real data before committing team time to a fix
• Design and implement fixes that compound, including shift-left quality changes, tooling investment, and better context and interfaces for both humans and agents, rather than one-off patches
• Stay hands-on enough to review architecture, dig into pipeline internals, and unblock the team on hard technical problems directly
• Own a small set of high-impact friction areas as pathfinders, driving each from diagnosis through fix to measurable metric movement
• Work directly with affected engineering teams to ensure fixes are trusted, adopted, and don't quietly get reverted or worked around
• Track and report metric movement honestly, including when a bet didn't pay off
• Capture and codify reusable patterns and playbooks so that fixes validated by this team can be adopted org-wide with minimal friction
• Set a cadence for reporting impact back to EM peers and leadership, framed around metric movement rather than activity
• Ensure the pilot's fixes degrade gracefully and don't introduce new reliability risk into CI/CD systems that other teams depend on
• Help define what 'graduation' from pilot to permanent function looks like, and build the case (or the honest counter-case) based on results

Requirements:

• Track record leading small, high-autonomy engineering teams, ideally in developer productivity, CI/CD, platform, or infrastructure reliability, measured on system-level outcomes rather than feature delivery
• Deep comfort with CI/CD and build systems. You understand why pipelines flake, why they're slow, and what actually moves success-rate and latency numbers versus what just feels like progress
• Demonstrated root-cause instinct and a bar for talent over headcount: you'd rather run understaffed than fill a seat with someone good-enough
• Comfort operating under metrics-driven accountability, including publicly baselining a number and reporting honestly against it
• Strong executive-level communication. This pilot has direct visibility to engineering leadership
• Experience with agentic or AI-assisted development workflows, and a view on where human/agent friction shows up differently than pure human friction
• Prior experience running a defined-window pilot or 0 to 1 initiative with explicit success criteria
• Familiarity with GitLab's own CI/CD internals, or equivalent depth on another large-scale build/test system