Principal Executive Recruiter

An overview of this role

As a Principal Executive Recruiter at GitLab, you’ll lead VP-level and other senior leadership searches across Sales, People, Legal, Finance, and other corporate teams. You’ll partner directly with senior executives to identify, engage, assess, and hire leaders, bringing market intelligence and a research-driven approach to complex, often confidential searches. Alongside owning searches end to end, you’ll help shape the strategies, frameworks, and practices that strengthen executive recruiting at GitLab, balancing search rigor with the agility of a fast-moving technology organization.

What you’ll do

• Lead VP-level and other senior leadership searches end to end, from search strategy and market mapping through assessment, selection, and closing.
• Advise C-suite executives and senior business leaders on hiring decisions, challenge assumptions, and navigate complex stakeholder dynamics.
• Develop talent strategies using market mapping, competitive intelligence, creative sourcing, and recruiting data to guide each search.
• Build relationships with passive executive talent, understand their motivations, and connect opportunities to GitLab’s mission and business priorities.
• Partner with hiring leaders to define success profiles, assess executive capabilities and business impact, and guide evidence-based hiring decisions.
• Own executive candidate relationships and deliver a high-touch experience through compensation discussions, competing opportunities, and negotiations.
• Manage multiple confidential, business-critical searches with discretion, balancing urgency, quality, stakeholder alignment, and candidate experience.
• Collaborate with Talent Acquisition leadership and executive recruiting peers to improve search frameworks, assessment practices, reporting, and tools.

What you’ll bring

• Experience independently leading VP-level and senior executive searches through successful hires in an executive search firm, an in-house executive recruiting function, or both.
• Executive recruiting experience across functions such as Sales, People, Legal, Finance, or other corporate teams, with the business acumen and curiosity to learn new domains.
• The ability to build trusted relationships with C-suite executives, influence senior stakeholders, and provide candid, evidence-based guidance on hiring decisions.
• Skills in talent research, market mapping, creative sourcing, leadership assessment, and engaging and closing passive executive talent.
• Business judgment, communication, and negotiation skills to navigate sensitive searches, complex compensation discussions, and competing executive priorities.
• Experience developing or improving executive search methodologies, frameworks, and processes while maintaining speed and flexibility.
• A hands-on approach to managing multiple high-priority searches independently and working through ambiguity.
• Experience in high-growth technology or enterprise software organizations, global executive searches, and distributed organizations is helpful.

About the team

You’ll join a globally distributed, remote-first Talent Acquisition team where clear communication and reliable follow-through matter. Guided by GitLab’s operating principles, including Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, and Customer Outcomes, we take ownership, move with urgency and rigor, and focus on hiring outcomes that matter to our internal customers. We share learnings and create reusable resources to continually improve the quality and consistency of hiring across Business teams.

United States Salary Range 184800 - 314400 USD