Engineering Manager, Security Platform: Authentication

An overview of this role

As an Engineering Manager on GitLab's Authentication team, you'll build and lead a team of engineers in Bangalore who own how users, applications, tokens, and artificial intelligence (AI) agents sign in to GitLab. At GitLab, we see our team as our product. You'll need to be technically credible in authentication protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). Your main focus will be hiring well, growing your engineers, and helping the team deliver on commitments that other parts of GitLab depend on. You'll guide your team's work on OAuth across Cells, global identities, token consolidation, and moving authentication out of the Ruby on Rails monolith onto GATE, GitLab's new authentication and authorization platform. You'll manage these multi-quarter programs with fixed deadlines and many dependent teams.

 

What you'll do

• Hire, onboard, and grow a team of senior and intermediate engineers in Bangalore, working with talent acquisition during a high-volume hiring period.
• Own delivery for your team's part of the authentication roadmap: plan in milestones, track risks early, and communicate clearly when a date is at risk and what would change it.
• Work with your Staff Engineer and Product Manager to turn architecture decisions into shippable, feature-flagged increments.
• Protect your team's focus. Manage requests from other teams through one intake path, and make trade-offs visible to leadership.
• Coordinate with the GATE Core, GATE Infra, Authorization, and Tenant Scale (Cells and Organizations) teams across India, Europe, and the Americas.
• Make sure the team runs what it builds, including on-call coverage, incident response for authentication issues, rate limits, and production readiness for new services.
• Build a team culture where security comes first, decisions are written down, and code review is thorough and kind.
• Give clear, regular feedback, run career conversations, and handle performance issues early.
• Take part in on-call or operational support where your team’s ownership model requires it.

What you'll bring

• Significant experience as an engineering manager of backend or platform teams, including hiring and growing senior engineers.
• A background as an engineer in identity, authentication, or security systems, with enough depth in OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, and JSON Web Tokens to review designs and ask probing questions.
• Experience delivering complex, multi-team programs against fixed dates, including migrations that must not disrupt existing customers.
• Experience running production services, including on-call coverage, incident response, and reliability work.
• Working knowledge of Ruby on Rails or Go.
• Experience building a new team or growing one quickly while keeping the hiring bar high.
• Clear, concise written English and comfort leading a team in an all-remote, asynchronous company across time zones.

About the team

We're part of the Security Platform stage, alongside Authorization, GATE Core, GATE Infra, Secrets Manager, and other security teams. You'll partner closely with our existing Authentication engineers in Europe and the Americas.