The Lead, Community Growth Marketing Manager leads community strategy, member experience, and integrated marketing across GitLab’s community portfolio including the Software Engineering Leadership Forum. This role defines how our communities grow and deliver value, building experiences that foster meaningful connections, sustained participation, and long-term engagement. This is an opportunity to build community as a growth practice, turning community relationships into impact supporting GitLab’s growth flywheel. 

What you'll do

• Shape SELF's strategy and growth plans, building strategies that attract the right audiences and strengthen engagement and advocacy.
• Lead the programming and audience experience for SELF events and chapters. Define the purpose, format, agenda, speakers, and follow-up, partnering with program operations and event teams on logistics and delivery.
• Design the full member experience, including automated journeys and cross-functional workflows with Lifecycle Marketing, Marketing Operations, and program teams. Connect invitations, onboarding, event follow-up, ongoing engagement, and reporting so SELF and other programs scale without losing personalization.
• Build SELF's annual programming and marketing calendar. Coordinate experiences with GitLab's broader campaigns, launches, field activities, and marketing priorities.
• Put AI to work in community marketing. Experiment with ways to automate workflows, understand member feedback, personalize content, and make better decisions. Apply human judgment, review outputs for quality, and handle member data responsibly.
• Partner with Sales and Customer Success to identify priority accounts and top customer champions. Build relevant paths for them to join and contribute to community programs as members, speakers, and peer leaders, with coordinated outreach and follow-up.
• Collaborate with internal executive teams and crossfunctional partners, as well as external community partners to seed growth and integrate across existing plans. 
• Track, measure and iterate on membership growth, event participation and quality, activation, retention, satisfaction, priority-account engagement, and advocacy. 

What you'll bring

• Experience building or scaling communities, membership programs, or peer networks.
• Ability to turn strategy into a clear growth plan, annual programming and marketing calendar, and coordinated member journey.
• An understanding of how community, customer engagement, advocacy, and account growth reinforce one another.
• Experience partnering closely with sales teams to identify priority accounts and customer champions and engage them in relevant programs.
• Demonstrated experience planning and delivering both virtual and in-person events, including community events. Ability to connect audience selection, programming, speaker engagement, and follow-up to member value and measurable outcomes.
• Familiarity with lifecycle marketing, marketing automation, CRM systems, web analytics, or campaign measurement.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration and writing skills, with the ability to communicate a program's value to different audiences.
• Ability to use member research, event feedback, engagement data, and marketing results to make decisions and improve programs.
• Sound judgment and the ability to balance ownership of SELF with marketing support for other community programs, working with operational partners on delivery.

About the Team 

The Growth Community Programs team supports GitLab’s growth flywheel, seeding tomorrow’s customers and activating today’s. We design the programs and motions that turn customer and community relationships into lasting member value, advocacy, pipeline and expansion.