Director – Financial Planning and Analysis

An overview of this role

As Director, Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A), you'll lead finance for GitLab's Research & Development (R&D) organization, our largest operating expense area. You'll be the strategic finance partner to our Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and their leadership team, owning R&D planning, forecasting, and investment decisions.

R&D builds our AI-powered development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) platform, which more than 100,000 organizations use. You'll connect investment in headcount, infrastructure, AI and cloud usage, and tooling to product outcomes, with clear measurement and reliable forecasts.

You'll sit at the CTO's staff table, shape GitLab's long-range plan, and help leadership decide where to invest next, making R&D spend predictable.

What you’ll do

• Serve as the finance advisor to the CTO and R&D leadership. Hold partners accountable for execution against plan and connect R&D priorities to company financial targets.
• Lead annual planning, and rolling forecasts for R&D. Own the operating plan across headcount, compensation, contractors, hosting and cloud, AI and large language model (LLM) costs, software, and tooling.
• Build frameworks that connect R&D investment to product roadmap outcomes. Evaluate business cases for new initiatives, AI capabilities, build-versus-buy decisions, and vendor commitments, and present risks and opportunities to leadership.
• Define and track R&D efficiency metrics, including R&D spend as a percentage of revenue, cost per engineer, hosting cost per user, and AI inference cost per feature. Identify large-scale savings and reallocation opportunities and see them through to completion.
• Partner with People and R&D leaders on hiring plans, location strategy, and organizational design. Keep headcount forecasts accurate and reconciled to actuals.
• Lead the AI transformation of R&D finance. Rethink planning, forecasting, and reporting workflows, and use AI tools to make them faster, more accurate, and more insightful.
• Redesign FP&A processes, policies, and planning and reporting systems for efficiency and effectiveness, with AI in the center. Work with Accounting on capitalized software, accruals, and allocations, and with Procurement on process improvements.
• Lead and develop your R&D finance team:: hire and coach team members, set goals and priorities, and give expert feedback. Put GitLab's values into practice through handbook-first, asynchronous collaboration across time zones.

What you’ll bring

• Extensive finance experience, including serving as the lead finance partner to an R&D, Engineering, or Product organization plus experience leading a team of analysts
• A strong understanding of financial statements, accounting principles, and R&D cost drivers, including engineering headcount, cloud hosting, AI and LLM usage, software licenses, and capitalized software development.
• Experience leading process redesign and change in a finance team, including hands-on use of AI tools to improve how work gets done.
• Expertise in influencing senior technical stakeholders and translating complex analysis into clear recommendations for executives.
• Advanced financial modeling skills that follow industry best practices, expertise in Google Sheets, and hands-on experience with financial and data visualization tools. We don't use Excel for modeling.
• A bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or a related field.
• Comfort working remotely and asynchronously, and the ability to use GitLab.
• Preferred experience includes enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) finance; direct CTO partnership; NetSuite, Sisense, Adaptive Planning, or SQL; or a Master of Business Administration (MBA), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), or Certified Public Accountant (CPA) qualification.

United States Salary Range 168000 - 285600 USD