Engineering Manager - Architecture Engineering: Async

An overview of this role

As Engineering Manager, Architecture Engineering: Async, you'll lead a distributed group of Site Reliability Engineers and Backend Engineers. You'll support their development and balance production reliability with platform projects, including zero-downtime Redis upgrades, support for single-tenant and cell-based deployments, and the move from queue-based job orchestration to a durable workflow engine.

What you'll do

• Lead, hire, and grow a team of site reliability engineers and backend engineers, supporting career development, promotions, and onboarding.
• Own reliability for the job processing and caching platforms, including service-level objectives, error budgets, alerting, and weekly operational reviews.
• Manage capacity planning, support escalations, and incident follow-ups, balancing operational work with roadmap projects and rescoping work when deadlines can't be met.
• Run the team's part of GitLab.com's first-tier on-call rotation, including shift coverage, onboarding, and handovers, and serve as incident commander for high-severity incidents.
• Drive zero-downtime Redis version upgrades and automate operating system patching and reboots.
• Adapt job processing to run in single-tenant and cell-based deployments.
• Own the migration from queue-based job orchestration to a durable workflow engine, defining the first use cases, a measurable migration path, and the roadmap.
• Own quarterly planning and the team roadmap, and clarify shared operational responsibilities with partner teams, including Git storage.
• Take part in on-call or operational support where your team’s ownership model requires it.

What you'll bring

• Experience managing an engineering team delivering high-performance services at scale, ideally site reliability engineers or infrastructure engineers running production software as a service systems.
• Technical depth in background job processing and caching technologies such as Redis and Sidekiq, sufficient to guide decisions about upgrades, capacity, and failure modes.
• Experience managing reliability against service-level objectives, including defining service-level indicators, setting up burn-rate alerting, and planning capacity.
• Experience running a 24/7 on-call rotation and coordinating high-severity incidents.
• A track record of balancing operational work and incident follow-ups with roadmap projects, and pushing back on scope when deadlines can't be met.
• Experience leading a fully remote team across time zones in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific.

About the team

The Async team runs GitLab.com's background processing layer, from the Sidekiq infrastructure to the shared code that enqueues jobs. Product teams build the jobs; we keep the platform that runs them fast and reliable. Our Redis clusters support caching, sessions, rate limiting, queues, and shared state. We also support data durability through backup and restore verification, object storage, and operational support for Git repository storage. That work includes restore drills, capacity rebalancing, and provisioning. We staff GitLab.com's first-tier production on-call rotation in 8-hour shifts across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, triaging every paging alert and bringing in the right team when needed.