[Hiring] Senior Engineering Manager, Design @GitLab

Role Description

As the first Engineering Manager embedded in the Upstream Studios organization at GitLab, you'll lead a focused team of Engineers responsible for two foundational surfaces:

• The Pajamas Design System, which powers the coherence of the entire GitLab product.
• docs.gitlab.com, the documentation platform serving millions of GitLab users and contributors worldwide.

This is a rare opportunity to define what engineering leadership looks like inside a design organization. You’ll report to the Chief Design Officer and partner closely with:

• Product Design
• Technical Writing
• Localization
• Marketing
• Product Management
• Engineering leaders across GitLab

Building partnerships and making it easier for engineers everywhere to contribute to Pajamas will be central to your success. You’ll be a hands-on technical leader and people manager in equal measure:

• Guiding architecture decisions
• Shaping contribution workflows
• Helping a small, high-impact team do some of the most leveraged work at GitLab

Qualifications

• Experience leading infrastructure, platform, or development teams, with a track record of building high-performing, values-aligned teams.
• Deep expertise in design systems, including design tokens, component architecture, accessibility standards, and contribution models.
• Excellent technical background, including professional experience with Git, docs-as-code, Hugo, accessibility, and building and maintaining a design system.
• Experience of building and supporting multi-lingual sites and localization workflows at scale.
• Professional experience with JavaScript (Vue.js) and familiarity with Elasticsearch, Ruby/Go, AI tools, and CI/CD practices.
• Strong expertise in running and scaling large, consumer-grade platforms, with a focus on reliability, security, performance, and scalability.
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.
• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions.
• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems.
• Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process.
• Passion for open source and developer tools, with a commitment to GitLab's values, inclusive culture, and high-performance expectations.

Requirements

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of engineers, working across the Pajamas Design System and the GitLab documentation site.
• Define and build the engineering practice within Upstream Studios.
• Guide architecture and technical decisions for the design system and the docs site.
• Help others across the organization understand the strategic value of a well-maintained design system and documentation platform.
• Advocate for engineering quality: technical debt, accessibility standards, customer issues, security, and platform reliability.
• Collaborate with Product Design and Technical Writing to translate design and content needs into scalable technical solutions.

Benefits

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