An overview of this role

As a Senior Engineering Manager, Tenant Experience Platform, you'll shape the platform foundations that make GitLab easier to upgrade, operate, and manage. You'll oversee multiple engineering teams working across observability infrastructure, tenant controls, and upgrade tooling that enable self-managed, Dedicated, and cloud-native deployments. This is a high-impact opportunity to shape how operators and tenants experience GitLab across modular services such as AI Gateway, ClickHouse, OpenBao, and Zoekt, while helping define zero-downtime upgrades for cloud-native customers and OAK, a single-node Kubernetes path for Omnibus customers. In your first year, you'll stand up this function, grow the team, set clearer technical direction across these areas, and align them around a cohesive Tenant Experience strategy.

Some examples of our projects:

• An observability platform with self-healing frameworks that turn raw signals into operator action
• Tenant controls including rate limits, feature flags, limit-increase workflows, and self-service models
• Upgrade tooling that makes GitLab simple, fast, and low-risk to upgrade, including zero-downtime upgrades for cloud-native customers, coordinated upgrades across GitLab's modular services, and OAK (single-node Kubernetes) as a path forward for Omnibus customers
• Cross-cutting platform standards for how tenants experience reliability, control, and change

What you’ll do

• Manage engineering teams focused on observability, tenant controls, and upgrade tooling across the Tenant Experience platform.
• Drive a clear Tenant Experience vision across self-managed, Dedicated, and cloud-native deployments, including tradeoffs needed to serve self-managed GitLab customers.
• Guide technical and organizational direction across observability infrastructure, self-healing frameworks, rate limits, feature flags, and coordinated upgrade orchestration.
• Work closely with engineering managers, staff and principal engineers, and partner teams including Reliability & Production Engineering, GitLab Delivery, and Dedicated.
• Coach engineering managers on team health, performance, prioritization, hiring, and organizational design.
• Develop actionable roadmaps from broad platform strategy, with clear milestones, owners, and delivery timelines that teams can track.
• Own production outcomes that affect tenants and operators, with success measured by upgrade reliability, observability coverage, and time to make self-service controls available.
• Improve execution by creating clarity, fostering strong technical discussion, and helping teams make choices as requirements evolve.

What you’ll bring

• Experience managing engineering managers and guiding them in execution, hiring, performance, and team health.
• Experience guiding distributed teams through change and ambiguity while building clarity, accountability, and momentum.
• Experience building or scaling a function, including shaping teams for evolving scope.
• Knowledge of self-managed, on-premises, or bare metal environments and how they differ from cloud-first operating assumptions.
• Familiarity with large-scale distributed systems and SaaS services, including containerized and Kubernetes-based delivery models.
• Working knowledge of observability practices such as metrics, logs, traces, service level indicators, and service level targets, along with concepts like self-healing systems, rate limiting, and feature-flagged rollouts.
• Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and contribute informed judgment on platform architecture and cross-team system integration.
• Knowledge of emerging engineering practices and developer workflows, including AI-assisted tooling, with the ability to balance productivity, team development, and engineering standards across multiple teams.

About the team

The Tenant Experience team is part of GitLab's Infrastructure Platforms organization and owns the operator-facing and tenant-facing parts of the platform: how GitLab is observed, controlled, and upgraded. We work asynchronously across regions and partner closely with Reliability & Production Engineering, GitLab Delivery, and Dedicated to integrate tooling and workflows into a coherent platform experience. Our current focus is reducing the operational burden of running GitLab at every scale, defining clearer platform standards, and building foundations that help services evolve separately while staying coordinated for customers.