GitLab is an open-core software company that develops the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform, used by more than 100,000 organizations. Our mission is to enable everyone to contribute to and co-create the software that powers our world. When everyone can contribute, consumers become contributors, significantly accelerating human progress. Our platform unites teams and organizations, breaking down barriers and redefining what’s possible in software development. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise and Duo Agent Platform, customers get AI benefits at every stage of the SDLC.
The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.
An overview of this role
You’ll lead the Core Planning team within GitLab’s Plan stage, reimagining how development teams organize, coordinate, and plan their work at enterprise scale. Right now, planning is fragmented—teams juggle issues, epics, and tickets while struggling to connect their daily work to business outcomes. You’ll solve this by building flexible, configurable planning fundamentals that replace outdated agile mechanisms with intelligent automation. Your focus will be on evolving our work item model, integrating agentic AI functionality that handles repetitive planning tasks, and freeing up teams to focus on what matters: strategy, intent, and delivery. You’ll report to a Group Manager of Product, working closely with product design and engineering leadership to define planning for a modern, AI-powered world. In your first year, you’ll reshape the core planning experience that millions of developers across 100,000+ GitLab customers will rely on—transforming how teams think about planning, not as a burden, but as an intelligent partner in their success.
What you’ll do
- Lead the Core Planning team’s vision and strategy, guiding GitLab’s shift from traditional agile planning mechanics toward enterprise-ready planning fundamentals that empower teams to organize, coordinate, and execute work more effectively
- Own the product strategy for work items—simplifying the fragmented landscape of issues, epics, and tickets into a configurable, unified primitive that scales across organizations of any size
- Drive the integration of agentic AI functionalities into planning workflows, replacing manual planning tasks with intelligent automation while ensuring trustworthiness and reliability for end users
- Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, design, and product teams to understand developer and engineering manager needs, translating them into products that improve team coordination and workflow
- Define how planning connects to business outcomes, helping teams understand the ROI of their work and make data-driven capacity and cycle-time decisions
- Co-shape the product’s approach to managing context and knowledge, ensuring critical business information and specifications flow seamlessly through the development lifecycle
- Partner with the Knowledge & Context and Project Management teams within Plan stage to balance responsibilities and eliminate redundancy as the planning experience evolves in the SDLC
What you’ll bring
- Experience building or shipping products for SaaS, DevOps, or DevSecOps platforms, or working in scale-ups in adjacent spaces
- Working knowledge of software development and familiarity with how development teams organize and coordinate their work
- Demonstrated ability to collaborate closely with engineering teams and use data and metrics to inform product decisions
- Comfort learning quickly in new domains and adapting your approach and decision making based on new information, rather than relying primarily on past patterns
- Track record of picking things up efficiently and getting productive in new product areas or organizations without extended onboarding periods
- A mindset that values fresh perspectives and questioning existing approaches, even if you’ve worked in related spaces before
- Experience working in distributed or remote environments, or collaborating with teams across different regions and time zones with excellent verbal and written communication skills.
About the team
The Plan stage is reimagining how development teams organize, coordinate, and execute their work. The Core Planning team you’ll lead is at the heart of this transformation, owning the foundational workflows and mechanics that enable teams to plan effectively at scale. Working closely with engineering partners and product designers, your team is responsible for simplifying how work items (issues, epics, and tickets) are configured and coordinated, while simultaneously building trustworthy AI-powered agentic functionalities that free humans from repetitive planning tasks so they can focus on strategy and intent. You’ll be tackling some of the most interesting challenges in DevOps: moving teams beyond traditional agile estimation guessing games toward real data-driven capacity planning, connecting business outcomes to actual team velocity, and scaling planning workflows across organizations with hundreds of developers. The team operates asynchronously across distributed regions and collaborates closely with engineering (led by your EM counterpart), design, and the broader Plan stage initiatives focused on knowledge management and intelligent automation. This is an opportunity to shape how millions of developers work together, replacing manual, repetitive planning mechanics with intelligent systems that amplify human decision-making.
Remote-Global
How GitLab will support you
Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you’re excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.
Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.
Privacy Policy: Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us.
GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.
