Chief People Officer

The GitLab team has grown quickly and plans to continue to grow while maintaining our culture of remote working, embracing development, and building scalable people-oriented policies. The Chief People Officer (CPO) is a strategic leader and consultant that oversees the People Success (People Operations, Learning & Development, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Total Rewards, People Business Partners) and Recruiting functions. The CPO is empowered to grow teams, make data-driven decisions, and deliver transparent and people first programs.

Responsibilities

Provide strategy and oversight of the administration of our compensation, benefits, and HRIS system
Work to refine and improve our global compensation frameworks
Advise the executive team on relevant compliance and employment law and introduce best practices to protect the organization
Develop and implement effective training programs for GitLab employees and community
Harness the existing culture and values when building out internal people-related policies while devising new ways to reinforce and improve upon the culture
Manage talent initiatives from recruiting and onboarding to employee retention and offboarding
Identify and measure organizational KPIs and OKRs for the People Division
Implement a global program for evaluating performance and providing feedback
Advise the company on all legal issues related to employment
Evaluate and manage all third party People Ops vendors and partners
Manage and grow the People Division
Report directly to the CEO

Requirements

People Success Experience

You have more than 5 years of experience in a People Success executive position(s) or an HR executive position. In those roles, you had at least 3 levels reporting to you (directors, managers, and IC’s).
You’ll bring a deep understanding of US employment law and associated best practices. Someone with experience in international employment law is preferred.
You’ve led a complex organization.
You’ll improve the effectiveness of the executive team.
Your experience will aide us as we deal with complex employer-relation issues.
You’ll bring a deep understanding of recruiting tactics, metrics, and capacity planning.
You’ve helped develop career paths, promotion reviews, and compensation cycles in previous roles.
You’re familiar with the issues that public companies face.
You’ll embody the approach we expect from Executive Group leadership at GitLab
You can learn how to use GitLab
You’ll bring some international HR or People Ops experience.

Scaling

You’re able to plan for future hires and hire according to that plan.
You’ve worked in high growth environments. As an example, you could have worked at an organization that has more-than-doubled the number of team members year over year

Values

You’ll share our values, work following those values.
You’ll help reinforce and nurture our values internally.
Dogfooding: Eating our dog food is important to us. You’ll demonstrate a willingness to work with git and GitLab while using GitLab workflows within the People Ops team.
Collaboration: You’ll respond to company criticism quickly, effectively, and visibly. You’ll foster and support an inclusive environment within the People team and the wider organization.
Results: It’s important we do what we promised to each other, customers, users, and investors. You’ll demonstrate this in your approach to leadership.
Efficiency: You’ll bring boring solutions to the team, constantly look for efficiency improvements across GitLab, and holding other e-group members accountable for upholding their efficiency too.
Diversity: You’ll help us increase the diversity of the team, and better the feelings of inclusion and belonging at GitLab.
Iteration: You’ll do the smallest thing possible and get it out as quickly as possible. Minimal Valuable Change is how we all work here.
Transparency: You’ll be committed to making the People Team as open and transparent as possible.
You’ll demonstrate the ability to engage, motivate & inspire a global People team

All-remote

We’re able to hire team members across the globe. Part of your role will involve discovering approaches that help us hire team members in as many locations around the world as possible.
You’ll help reinforce our communication guidelines. As you’ll see, our approach to communication is unique and you’ll need to be comfortable adapting your own style.

Analytical

You’ll efficiently collect and select the right metrics that’ll lead to impactful reporting and change.
You’ll make data-informed business cases and utilize data to understand the tradeoffs for those decisions.
You’re able to articulate and quantify a compensation philosophy logic.
You help us achieve company-wide consistency in bonuses, promotions, raises, refreshes, leadership development.
Your ideas and insights will aide us as we look to measure the effectiveness of interviewers and the caliber of new hires.
You’ll adopt an analytical and methodical approach to performance and compensation reviews.
Quantitative methods will underpin your approach for identifying high-potential and underperformance.

Other requirements

You’ll bring concise written and verbal communication skills to the team

Performance Indicators

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process. To learn more about someone who may be conducting the interview, find their job title on our team page.

Qualified candidates will be invited to schedule at least 2 screening calls with one of our Global Recruiters or Talent Acquisition Partners.
Then a 50 minute meeting with the CEO/Co-Founder,
Next, a round of 3 separate 50 minute interviews with the VP of Recruiting, the Senior Director, People Operations and the Chief Legal Officer,
Next, a 80 minute interview with the CEO/Co-Founder,
Next, a round of 4 separate 50 minute interviews with the other executives; Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Revenue Officer, The Chief Marketing Officer, and either the Executive Vice President of Engineering or the Executive Vice President of Product,
Then we will introduce final candidates to the Board of Directors and may involve another round of interviews or meetings with selected board members;
Finally, as a part of the reference check stage, our CEO/Co-Founder will request the candidate’s last 360 review and will share theirs as well and schedule a call to review the feedback on both sides.

About GitLab

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 the rate of human progress. This mission is integral to our culture, influencing how we hire, build products, and lead our industry. We make this possible at GitLab by running our operations on our product and staying aligned with our values. Learn more about Life at GitLab. Thanks to products like Duo Enterprise, and Duo Workflow, customers get the benefit of AI 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. All team members are encouraged and expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact across our global organisation.

See our culture page for more!

Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto and guides.

Last modified June 3, 2025: Removal of Comp Calc References & Job Architecture Transition Updates (f0896a99)

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