Engineering Manager, Async Platform at GitLab in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a senior leadership role at one of the most prominent fully-remote companies in the world, making it a high-signal career move for engineering managers targeting infrastructure or platform leadership. GitLab's transparent, handbook-driven culture is a well-known training ground for remote leadership excellence.
Compensation context: No salary is listed, but Engineering Manager roles at GitLab at this level typically range from $180K–$230K USD base (US-equivalent), with additional equity through stock options and an ESPP. In Poland or the UK (hinted locations), local pay scales will apply and may differ significantly.
Skills this role develops — all in high demand:
- Large-scale Redis and Sidekiq infrastructure management (critical for SaaS platforms)
- Durable workflow engine migration — emerging architectural pattern replacing queue-based systems
- SLO/error-budget management and incident command at scale
- Managing globally distributed SRE and backend teams
Green flags: GitLab's public handbook, strong DEI commitment, explicit career development support (Growth Fund, promotions process), and a meritocratic culture are positives. The role has clear technical ownership with cross-team impact.
Watch for: The on-call responsibility at the manager level is demanding — you're not just supporting the rotation, you're owning it and acting as incident commander. This is a high-accountability role. Candidates who thrive will have a strong track record of balancing operational firefighting with strategic roadmap delivery.
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 experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.
Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.
Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.
GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab's policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.
Frequently Asked Questions
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