Senior Engineering Manager, Non-Linear Productivity

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. About the role Senior Engineering Managers at GitLab own outcomes for a defined engineering domain, build and grow the team that delivers them, and are trusted to operate with significant autonomy against a clear mandate. This Senior Engineering Manager role focuses on driving non-linear productivity by building and leading a small, hand-picked team of engineers who find and fix the highest-leverage friction points in GitLab's own SDLC. Rather than incremental team management, this is a 0 to 1 team-building mandate. You will personally recruit 4 exceptional engineers, define how they work, and drive them through a root-cause, shift-left approach to engineering productivity, measured in system-level metrics (MRPM, pipeline success rate, pipeline latency), not story points or activity. You will act as a bridge between the pilot squad, engineering managers whose teams are affected by friction points, and leadership, ensuring the team's fixes deliver durable, measurable value before any of it is proposed as a permanent function. This role reports to a VP-level engineering leader. What you'll do Vision & Strategy • 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. Team Building & Leadership • 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. Deep Technical Exploration & Experimentation • 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. Internal Adoption & Non-Linear Productivity • 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 b