Director, Support (EMEA)

An overview of this role

As Director, Support Engineering for EMEA, you'll manage an experienced, distributed team serving enterprise customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Reporting to the Vice President of Support Engineering, you'll own the region's people strategy, operational delivery, and customer support outcomes while building a healthy team that delivers a strong customer experience.

You'll bring deep experience managing multi-country teams, operating across time zones, and shaping enterprise technical support in an AI-first environment. As a member of the global Support Engineering management group, you'll work with peer managers across the Americas and Asia-Pacific to improve service delivery, regional coordination, and GitLab's global support strategy.

What you’ll do

• Manage the full people agenda for the EMEA Support Engineering team, including performance, career development, succession planning, retention, internal mobility, and team culture across multiple countries.
• Manage managers and senior contributors across EMEA time zones, setting clear expectations and supporting consistent performance.
• Partner with the EMEA People Business Partner on employment considerations across jurisdictions, including Works Council engagement where applicable.
• Own regional service-level target performance, customer satisfaction, ticket quality, resolution outcomes, escalation workflows, and reporting against global key performance indicators.
• Improve shift handoffs and Request for Help coordination with Product Engineering and Support Engineering hubs in the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Bengaluru.
• Oversee EMEA's adoption and ongoing improvement of GitLab's AI toolchain, working with Support Operations and Strategy on tooling, data insights, capacity planning, and staffing management.
• Represent the needs of EMEA customers inside GitLab by identifying field patterns, escalating systemic product issues, influencing the product roadmap, and joining customer or partner conversations that require executive support.
• Shape global Support Engineering strategy with peer managers, including geographic coverage, quality standards, knowledge exchange, the operating model, annual planning, headcount modeling, and the regional roadmap.

What you’ll bring

• Progressive experience in technical support engineering or a related customer-facing technical discipline.
• Experience managing managers, senior contributors, and distributed teams through a manager-of-managers structure.
• Experience managing multi-country teams in EMEA, with knowledge of employment considerations, cultural differences, and communication across time zones.
• A track record of owning service delivery, including service-level target outcomes, escalations, and operational performance in a globally distributed environment.
• Experience with or interest in AI-assisted support delivery, with the ability to guide adoption and improve workflows.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work with executives and work with others synchronously and asynchronously.
• Proficiency with support platforms such as Zendesk, Salesforce, Decagon, or equivalent tools.
• Knowledge of DevSecOps, continuous integration and continuous delivery, Kubernetes, cloud-native infrastructure, or GitLab gained through customer-facing work, platform use, administration, or support operations.

About the team

The GitLab Support Engineering team is distributed across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific. The EMEA region represents some of our deepest and most complex enterprise customer relationships. Support Engineers and Managers work on tickets and help GitLab's customers, and they also dig into code and logs to find root causes. Collaboration here is extraordinary. We solve complex problems jointly, participate in pairing sessions and one-to-one meetings, and stay in contact across time zones through deliberate asynchronous habits.