An overview of this role
As Manager / Senior Manager, Cell Infrastructure, you'll help shape the foundation that lets GitLab run reliably across multiple cloud providers in the agentic era. As more enterprise customers adopt AI-driven development workflows, GitLab needs a cell-based infrastructure that can scale horizontally, support strong reliability, and operate with clear cost efficiency. In this role, you'll report to the VP Engineering, Platform Scale & Architecture and lead a 0 to 1 effort to build the control layer that determines how GitLab cells are provisioned, placed, and operated across clouds.
This is a high-impact leadership role where you'll define architecture as much as you'll deliver it. In your first year, you'll help establish the technical direction for multi-cloud cell infrastructure, build and grow the team based on level, and create the operational model for reliability, developer enablement, and cost visibility.
What you’ll do
- Lead the design and delivery of multi-cloud cell placement and orchestration systems that support GitLab's cell-based architecture.
- Build and grow the engineering team responsible for cell infrastructure, spanning architecture, delivery, and production operations.
- Drive infrastructure cost visibility and optimization by partnering with finance and platform teams to make unit economics part of the system design.
- Own the reliability model for cell infrastructure, including on-call practices, incident response, and postmortem follow-through.
- Partner with adjacent teams such as Git infrastructure, Artifact Registry, Duo Agent Platform, and CI/CD to support their scaling and deployment needs.
- Define and evolve architectural decisions for cross-cloud routing, data residency, and infrastructure portability.
- Develop platform capabilities and developer tooling that let teams deploy on top of cell infrastructure without needing to understand its internal complexity.
- Represent the team in cross-functional planning with senior engineering stakeholders on GitLab's broader cells and multi-cloud strategy.
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 experience with on-call, incident management, and site reliability engineering practices.
- Strong knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals such as consistency models, partitioning and sharding, failure modes, and multi-region or multi-cloud tradeoffs.
- Experience leading engineering teams in a distributed environment, with scope aligned to either a single team or a broader multi-team organization.
- Ability to hire, support, and develop engineers, including senior individual contributors and, at the senior manager level, engineering managers.
- Experience building platform capabilities or developer tools that other engineering teams use to build and deploy software.
- Comfort working in ambiguity and helping define direction in an early-stage build rather than stepping into a maintenance-focused role.
- Clear cross-functional communication skills and the ability to work effectively with VP-level and CTO-level stakeholders.