Senior People Business Partner

GitLab GitLab · Enterprise · Canada +2 · Remote · People Business Partners

This role is for a Senior People Business Partner supporting GitLab's Engineering organization. The primary focus is on partnering with engineering leaders to navigate change, mature their organizations, and build a high-performance culture. Responsibilities include evolving job architecture, supporting leadership transitions, driving consistency in talent development, and advising on organizational design and change management. The role requires experience supporting engineering or technical organizations, working with senior leaders, and managing globally distributed teams.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partner with senior engineering leaders, including VPs, to understand their organizations, priorities, and challenges, and translate these into clear people and business priorities.
  2. Drive and support job architecture changes in Engineering, including the introduction of new levels, to help leaders adopt and mature consistent role expectations and career paths.
  3. Lead and facilitate key Engineering people processes, such as calibrations, in close partnership with the PBP team and cross-functional partners like Talent Management.
  4. Advise and coach engineering leaders on topics such as organization design, change management, and navigating global teams, including EMEA considerations.
  5. Work closely with other PBPs and Talent partners to share insights, align on approach, and ensure a consistent, high-quality experience for Engineering leaders and their teams.

Skills

Required

  • Experience as a People Business Partner or similar role supporting engineering or technical organizations, ideally with exposure to fast-paced tech environments of comparable size and complexity.
  • Background working with senior leaders, including Senior Directors and Vice Presidents, with the ability to build trusted relationships, influence decision-making, and provide clear, data-informed guidance.
  • Experience supporting globally distributed teams, including familiarity with working across multiple regions and time zones and navigating regional differences such as those in EMEA.
  • Comfort operating in periods of organizational change or transformation, such as job architecture updates, leadership transitions, or shifts in team structure and culture, while balancing strategic work (for example, organizational design, leadership effectiveness, and culture initiatives) with hands-on execution of core People processes.
  • Strong communication and collaboration skills, including working asynchronously and partnering cross-functionally with Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards, and other People teams.

Nice to have

  • Openness to learning GitLab’s ways of working and applying transferable experience from related domains (such as product or IT) while developing a deeper understanding of engineering needs.