Director of Engineering, Security Risk Management

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

We're seeking an exceptional Engineering Lead to drive the evolution of GitLab's Security Risk Management (SRM) stage into a world-class platform for vulnerability analysis and remediation at enterprise scale. This is a rare opportunity to architect and build distributed systems that will fundamentally change how large organizations approach application security and developer security workflows.

As the SRM Stage Lead, you'll be responsible for transforming our engineering culture toward high-performance distributed systems while delivering an exceptional user experience for both Application Security professionals and Developers. You'll own the technical strategy for processing, analyzing, and remediating vulnerabilities across massive codebases and complex enterprise environments.

What You’ll Do

Technical Leadership & Architecture

Design distributed systems architecture capable of processing vulnerability data from thousands of repositories, millions of commits, and complex dependency graphs in real-time

Drive storage system decisions for multi-petabyte security datasets, balancing query performance, cost efficiency, and data retention requirements across time-series, graph, and document storage paradigms

Architect scalable analysis pipelines that can ingest vulnerability feeds, correlate findings across multiple security tools, and provide actionable intelligence to both security teams and individual developers

Lead the technical evolution from monolithic security scanning to microservices-based, event-driven vulnerability management systems

Engineering Culture Transformation

Champion high-performance systems thinking throughout the team, establishing patterns for horizontal scaling, efficient resource utilization, and fault-tolerant distributed computing

Establish technical standards for system observability, chaos engineering, and performance optimization in security-critical systems

Mentor and develop senior engineers in distributed systems design, database optimization, and large-scale system architecture

Drive architectural decision records (ADRs) for major technical decisions, particularly around data storage, processing frameworks, and system boundaries

Product & User Experience Excellence

Own the end-to-end user journey (in partnership with PM) for both AppSec professionals managing enterprise-wide risk and developers receiving actionable security feedback in their workflow

Design APIs and interfaces that abstract complexity while providing the power and flexibility that security professionals demand

Collaborate with Product Management, UX an