Engineering Manager - Nonlinear Productivity (Friction Elimination & Solutions)

An overview of this role

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, and 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, with a clear view of cost, risk, and durability.
• Stand up prototypes and review architecture directly to test whether a proposed fix moves a target metric and represents a durable solution before GitLab makes broader engineering investment.
• Hire and manage a small, high-caliber team, or operate as a hands-on working manager, with a focus on talent density over headcount.
• Drive validated fixes from prototype to internal adoption by partnering with affected teams so solutions are relied on, used, and maintained.
• Build the technical and business case for productizing internal fixes that prove durable, in partnership with product.
• 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, including a clear account of what didn’t work.

What you’ll bring

• Ability to use GitLab.
• A track record of identifying and shipping technical fixes for developer productivity, continuous integration and continuous delivery, or platform friction, including problems you found before they were assigned.
• Comfort operating with high ambiguity and no existing backlog, building the roadmap rather than executing one handed down.
• People management experience, including in a small-team or working-manager capacity.
• Technical depth to evaluate and prototype solutions directly, not only direct others toward them.
• 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.

Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.