[Hiring] Manager, Engineering, Nonlinear Productivity (Friction Elimination & Solutions) @GitLab

Role Description

As Manager, Engineering, Nonlinear Productivity (Friction Elimination & Solutions), you’ll help GitLab break the linear relationship between headcount and engineering output. In this role, you’ll oversee the initiative’s forward-scanning work, reviewing GitLab’s software development lifecycle and code-generation workflows to spot recurring friction, test durable fixes, and identify internal solutions that could become customer-facing products.

You’ll report to the Senior Manager or Director, Nonlinear Productivity and work at the intersection of engineering, developer productivity, AI-assisted development, and product. You’ll build a data-backed view of where technical interventions can have the highest leverage, test solutions through prototypes, drive validated fixes into internal adoption, and help build the case for productizing the strongest outcomes.

What you’ll do

• Survey GitLab’s internal software development lifecycle and code-generation workflows to identify structural friction early.
• Build a data-backed view of where technical interventions will have the highest leverage.
• Evaluate build, buy, and adapt options for each opportunity, including emerging agentic and AI tooling.
• Stand up prototypes and review architecture directly to test whether a proposed fix moves a target metric.
• Hire and manage a small, high-caliber team, or operate as a hands-on working manager.
• Drive validated fixes from prototype to internal adoption by partnering with affected teams.
• Build the technical and business case for productizing internal fixes that prove durable.
• Document reusable learnings so successful internal fixes don’t remain tribal knowledge.
• Report impact through changes in key metrics and progress on turning internal fixes into products.

Qualifications

• Ability to use GitLab.
• A track record of identifying and shipping technical fixes for developer productivity, continuous integration and continuous delivery, or platform friction.
• Comfort operating with high ambiguity and no existing backlog.
• People management experience, including in a small-team or working-manager capacity.
• Technical depth to evaluate and prototype solutions directly.
• Product judgment to assess whether an internal tool could hold up for paying customers.
• Familiarity with agentic or AI-assisted development tooling.
• Experience moving an internal tool toward an external, customer-facing product is advantageous.

About the team

The Nonlinear Productivity team improves how GitLab engineers, and increasingly agents, build, review, and ship code. We test and scale durable technical fixes that improve our internal engineering output.

Career ladder

In this role, you can progress to Senior Manager, Nonlinear Productivity, with an expanded mandate across the full set of team metrics we use to track improvement.

Benefits

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