Engineering Manager, Architecture Engineering: Async

GitLab; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 95,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Paid Time Off

Team Member Resource Groups

Equity Compensation & Employee Stock

Growth and Development Fund

Parental Leave

Job summary

GitLab is seeking an Engineering Manager, Architecture Engineering: Async, to lead a distributed team of Site Reliability and Backend Engineers. You will balance production reliability with platform projects, including zero-downtime Redis upgrades and durable workflow engine migration.

You will own reliability, capacity planning, on-call rotations, and incident response, while guiding quarterly planning and cross-team roadmaps across global time zones. Remote-friendly, full-time role.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading an engineering team delivering high‑performance services at scale.
• Ability to manage reliability and capacity with SLIs/SLOs and incident reviews.
• Track record balancing operational work with roadmap delivery and cross‑team coordination.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a distributed team of SREs and backend engineers.
• Own reliability for job processing and caching platforms; define SLOs and burn rates.
• Drive migrations to durable workflow engines and oversee quarterly planning and roadmaps.
• Coordinate 24/7 on-call rotations and incident response across time zones.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Production reliability

Team mentorship

Tools

Redis

Sidekiq

Job description

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster. The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

* Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

An overview of this role

As Engineering Manager, Architecture Engineering: Async, you'll lead a distributed group of Site Reliability Engineers and Backend Engineers. You'll support their development and balance production reliability with platform projects, including zero-downtime Redis upgrades, support for single-tenant and cell-based deployments, and the move from queue-based job orchestration to a durable workflow engine.

What you'll do

• Lead, hire, and grow a team of site reliability engineers and backend engineers, supporting career development, promotions, and onboarding.
• Own reliability for the job processing and caching platforms, including service-level objectives, error budgets, alerting, and weekly operational reviews.
• Manage capacity planning, support escalations, and incident follow-ups, balancing operational work with roadmap projects and rescoping work when deadlines can't be met.
• Run the team's part of GitLab.com's first-tier on-call rotation, including shift coverage, onboarding, and handovers, and serve as incident commander for high-severity incidents.
• Drive zero-downtime Redis version upgrades and automate operating system patching and reboots.
• Adapt job processing to run in single-tenant and cell-based deployments.
• Own the migration from queue-based job orchestration to a durable workflow engine, defining the first use cases, a measurable migration path, and the roadmap.
• Own quarterly planning and the team roadmap, and clarify shared operational responsibilities with partner teams, including Git storage.

What you'll bring

• Experience managing an engineering team delivering high-performance services at scale, ideally site reliability engineers or infrastructure engineers running production software as a service systems.
• Technical depth in background job processing and caching technologies such as Redis and Sidekiq, sufficient to guide decisions about upgrades, capacity, and failure modes.
• Experience managing reliability against service-level objectives, including defining service-level indicators, setting up burn-rate alerting, and planning capacity.
• Experience running a 24/7 on-call rotation and coordinating high-severity incidents.
• A track record of balancing operational work and incident follow-ups with roadmap projects, and pushing back on scope when deadlines can't be met.
• Experience leading a fully remote team across time zones in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific.

About the team

The Async team runs GitLab.com's background processing layer, from the Sidekiq infrastructure to the shared code that enqueues jobs. Product teams build the jobs; we keep the platform that runs them fast and reliable. Our Redis clusters support caching, sessions, rate limiting, queues, and shared state. We also support data durability through backup and restore verification, object storage, and operational support for Git repository storage. That work includes restore drills, capacity rebalancing, and provisioning. We staff GitLab.com's first-tier production on-call rotation in 8-hour shifts across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, triaging every paging alert and bringing in the right team when needed.

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of exp