Engineering Manager, Create:Source Code

An overview of this role

The Source Code Engineering Manager focuses on people management within the engineering domain. This means creating an environment that helps deliver a world-class repository experience for our customers. They view their team as their primary product, developing engineers who take ownership of outcomes and hold themselves to the highest quality bar. They maintain technical credibility across the backend and frontend disciplines and understand the work engineers undertake. Their main responsibilities are hiring top-tier talent, ensuring the team's success, and supporting the definition and delivery of product commitments. They actively seek opportunities to enhance productivity and efficiency.

What you’ll do

• Foster an environment that values engineering excellence from Enterprise-grade scalability, Database performance, and fault tolerance to world-class web accessibility, performance beyond Web Vitals, semantic markup and bulletproof CSS best-practices.
• Hire, onboard, and develop team members who embody GitLab's values and contribute to building a peak-performance organization.
• Manage and improve agile, remote, async workflows so the team can iteratively deliver platform improvements and crucial features, communicating proactively when priorities shift or blockers emerge.
• Partner with Product Management, Product Design, and cross-functional engineering teams to align frontend and backend architecture with business goals and user needs. Maintain clear visibility into bug backlog health, stalled MRs, and milestone misses. Proactively address patterns of delayed execution before they require leadership escalation.
• Conduct regular 1-to-1 meetings, provide continuous feedback, and support engineers' professional growth through coaching and skill development opportunities.

What you’ll bring

• Substantial leadership experience managing high-performing engineering teams, with hands-on technical competency to provide architectural guidance and technical mentorship.
• A passion for version control as a whole, with a deep understanding of Git and current industry trends.
• Strong cross-functional alignment and consensus-building skills to align stakeholders across Product, Design, Engineering, and Infrastructure on technical decisions and strategic priorities. Able to drive decisions and execution even when the path of least resistance would be to defer or deprioritize.
• Direct production experience building applications with Ruby on Rails (or similar) and modern frontend frameworks (Vue.js, React, or Angular) at an enterprise level.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences and facilitate productive discussions in async and sync settings.
• Strong alignment with GitLab's values (Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, DIB, Iteration, Transparency) with demonstrated examples of living these principles in previous roles.
• Experience in remote-first, globally distributed organizations with a bias toward asynchronous communication and handbook-first documentation practices.
• Track record fostering inclusive team cultures where engineers feel psychologically safe to contribute, take calculated risks, and hold themselves and each other to high standards.

About the team

The Source Code team at GitLab owns GitLab's core repository experience, from Git command-line operations to web-based code exploration. This includes browsing files and folders, searching for commits, reading diffs between revisions, and assisting collaboration by supporting performant and accessible web solutions for Git primitives. Our roadmap includes user experience improvements to existing features, as well as enhancing the maintainability, accessibility, and performance of our offering and rethinking what an AI-native workflow looks like. We are shipping enhancements to how large binaries are handled and discovering and adapting version control workflows for teams using AI-assisted development tools. Our roadmap also includes technical initiatives like database scaling efforts, performance projects, and several initiatives to address technical debt. We are a distributed team spanning AMER and EMEA time zones, currently consisting of 4 frontend engineers, with a near-term evolution toward a mix of 4-6 backend and frontend engineers across all geographies as we refine our technical scope and improve efficiency. We interact closely with the other Source Code team and others like Gitaly (responsible for Git fundamentals), Data Stores, and Code Review to deliver cohesive experiences. For more on how we work, see Team Handbook Page and Category and Direction Page.

This is an opportunity to lead an established team with a strong reputation, guiding continued improvements to one of GitLab's most fundamental user experiences, while rethinking Source Code for the AI-native future at a scale that has not been seen before at GitLab.