VP - Quality

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

Quality:

• This leader owns quality as a first-class principle at GitLab. The scope includes test automation, reliability, and coverage across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed; pre-production validation; and continuous checks that confirm live services are meeting their SLAs, including synthetic testing.
• The organization provides the shared frameworks, environments, test infrastructure, release evidence, and engineering standards enabling functional teams to own quality while centrally standardizing and ensuring quality testing activity. It enables product teams to adopt paved roads for unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, performance, upgrade, and resilience testing.
• This organization builds proactive safeguards and trusted feedback loops across the software lifecycle. It establishes clear quality bars, error budgets, and leading indicators that surface risks early. It partners with teams to continually improve test reliability, pipeline health, and production readiness.
• The goal is a strong foundation that teams trust, enabling us to increase throughput with confidence.

Delivery:

• This leader owns the complete path from an engineer's merge request to running code across GitLab.com, Dedicated, and Self-Managed. For GitLab.com, the goal is true continuous delivery: dozens of deployments per day, with automated validation and rollback replacing manual intervention.
• That level of throughput requires strong safety systems, including progressive rollouts, feature flags, automated rollback, observability, and a blameless learning culture.
• This leader owns those systems as much as the throughput they enable. On-call load, customer-reported issues, and incident rates provide important signals for continuously strengthening the delivery platform as deployment frequency grows.

Self-Managed Platform and Lifecycle:

• Self-Managed represents roughly 70% of GitLab's revenue and must be treated as a first-class business. Today, it relies on monthly snapshot releases created from stable GitLab.com code. It takes approximately six months for half of our self-managed customers to adopt a version we have already shipped. This creates a significant opportunity to deliver new capabilities, security improvements, and customer value sooner.
• This leader owns self-managed end-to-end, including packaging, release cadence, upgrade experience, compatibility, and adoption. They will determine how much of the current adoption timeline reflects customer choice and operating requirements and how much can be shortened through a better product and delivery experience.
• The working assumption is that we can materially narrow it. This leader owns developing the strategy, aligning the company behind it, and delivering durable, measurable improvement.