An overview of this role

As the first Engineering Manager embedded the Upstream Studios organization at GitLab, you'll lead a focused team of Engineers responsible for two foundational surfaces: the Pajamas Design System, which powers the coherence of the entire GitLab product, and docs.gitlab.com, the documentation platform serving millions of GitLab users and contributors worldwide. 

This is a rare opportunity to define what engineering leadership looks like inside a design organization. You’ll report to the Chief Design Officer and partner closely with Product Design, Technical Writing, Localization, Marketing, Product Management, and Engineering leaders across GitLab. Critically, the design system is a contribution-based, company-wide platform that engineers across the entire organization depend on and actively participate in. Building those partnerships and making it easier for engineers everywhere to contribute to Pajamas will be central to your success. 

You’ll be a hands-on technical leader and people manager in equal measure: guiding architecture decisions, shaping contribution workflows, and helping a small, high-impact team do some of the most leveraged work at GitLab.

What you'll do

• Lead, mentor,and grow a high-performing team of engineers, working across the Pajamas Design System and the GitLab documentation site.
• Define and build the engineering practice within Upstream Studios–this is a new function and you’ll have real influence over how it takes shape.
• Guide architecture and technical decisions for the design system (components, tokens, patterns) and the docs site (performance, reliability, infrastructure, localization).
• Help others across the organization understand the strategic value of a well-maintained design system and documentation platform.
• Advocates for engineering quality: technical debt, accessibility standards, customer issues, security, and platform reliability.
• Collaborate with Product Design and Technical Writing to translate design and content needs into scalable technical solutions

What you'll bring

• Experience leading infrastructure, platform, or development teams, with a track record of building high-performing, values-aligned teams.
• Deep expertise in design systems–including design tokens, component architecture, accessibility standards, and contribution models.
• Excellent technical background, including professional experience with Git, docs-as-code, Hugo, accessibility and building and maintaining a design system.
• Experience of building and supporting multi-lingual sites and localization workflows at scale.
• Professional experience with JavaScript (Vue.js) and familiarity with Elasticsearch, Ruby/Go, AI tools, and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.
• Strong expertise in running and scaling large, consumer-grade platforms, with a focus on reliability, security, performance, and scalability.
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment.
• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions.
• Experience with performance and optimization problems and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems
• Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process.
• Passion for open source and developer tools, with a commitment to GitLab's values, inclusive culture, and high-performance expectations.

About the team

Upstream Studios is the full-stack experience organization for GitLab. We imagine it, we design it, we document it, we ship it—partnering across product, engineering, and marketing to deliver a continuous deployment of quality.

We integrate research, design, frontend engineering, documentation, and brand into a unified delivery pipeline, shaping how customers experience GitLab from first impression to final deployment. For more information on how we work, see the Upstream Studios section of the GitLab Handbook.

An overview of this role

As the Director of Technical Writing, you will help redefine how technical documentation is created, delivered, and experienced across GitLab. This role reports to the Chief Design Officer and leads a team through a period of meaningful change, with a strong focus on AI, process redesign, and tighter partnership with Engineering, Product Management, and UX. You will challenge long-standing assumptions, help engineering teams take greater ownership of source documentation, and explore how documentation can become more useful inside the product experience, including through GitLab Duo.

In your first year, you will assess the current team structure, strengthen skills and capabilities for the next phase of the function, improve collaboration across partner groups, and raise satisfaction with the docs site. This is a strong fit for a leader who can bring creative, practical thinking to a mature function and turn documentation into a more integrated, actionable part of the GitLab platform.

What you’ll do

• Lead the Technical Writing organization through process evaluation and redesign, with a focus on making documentation creation more efficient and better connected to product development.
• Drive the team’s AI readiness by identifying where AI can improve workflows, reduce unnecessary handoffs, and support better documentation outcomes.
• Partner with Engineering to shift documentation earlier in the development process and establish shared ownership of first-draft technical content.
• Collaborate with Product Management and UX to identify ways technical documentation can surface more directly in the product experience.
• Shape the team structure and operating model so it supports current priorities, healthy management scope, and future capability needs.
• Develop the team’s skills and expectations for a new phase of technical writing at GitLab, including adaptability, experimentation, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Improve the end-user experience of the docs site by guiding priorities that make content more useful, accessible, and actionable.
• Own strategic decisions for the function and bring forward multiple practical options when solving complex documentation and workflow challenges while honoring GitLab values.

What you’ll bring

• Experience leading technical writing or documentation teams through organizational, process, or operating model change.
• Fluency with AI in both strategic and practical contexts, including using AI to improve workflows and evaluating where human judgment remains essential.
• Ability to build strong partnerships with Engineering, Product Management, UX, and other functions that influence product and content quality.
• Judgment to balance innovation with practicality, including a thoughtful approach to automation that improves work without treating people as replaceable.
• Creative problem-solving skills and comfort proposing several workable paths forward when facing ambiguity or long-standing constraints.
• Experience developing leaders and teams, including assessing capabilities, setting direction, and supporting change across an established organization.
• Strength in asynchronous collaboration and communication across distributed teams, with the ability to create clarity and momentum across time zones.
• Technical credibility in documentation, developer workflows, docs-as-code environments, and we also welcome candidates with transferable leadership experience from adjacent disciplines.
• Content strategy expertise to shape documentation priorities, information architecture, and how technical content connects to product goals and user needs.

About the team

The Technical Writing team helps GitLab users understand, adopt, and get value from the platform through clear, useful documentation. The team works closely with Engineering, Product Management, and UX to support product changes and improve the overall documentation experience, and it is entering a phase focused on AI readiness, process redesign, and stronger integration with the product itself. This is a distributed team that collaborates asynchronously across regions, with current working patterns shaped by time zone overlap needs and close partnership with other product development functions. The team includes experienced contributors and managers, and this role will help guide how the function evolves from here.