Senior Engineering Manager, Design

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.

• 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

• 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.

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.