Principal Product Manager, Orbit

An overview of this role

As Principal Product Manager, Orbit, you'll define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for GitLab's software lifecycle context graph. Orbit connects source code and software development lifecycle data into a structured map of systems, relationships, dependencies, and ownership. You'll help engineers, software leaders, and artificial intelligence (AI) agents understand how teams build software and how changes affect the systems around it.

You'll shape Orbit from its underlying graph model and query experiences through customer value, pricing, packaging, launch, and adoption. This role combines technical product leadership with building a business around software lifecycle context. You'll balance foundational platform work with near-term customer needs, working directly with technical customers and senior Engineering and Design leaders.

You'll join Anand Ahire's product organization and partner across Product, Engineering, Design, Product Marketing, Sales, Solutions Engineering, and Customer Success, including the teams building GitLab Duo and the broader AI-powered development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) platform.

What you'll do

• Define Orbit's multi-year vision and roadmap across graph models and ontology, ingestion and indexing, query and retrieval, developer and agent interfaces, governance, and enterprise readiness. Shape how Orbit works across GitLab.com, Self-Managed, Dedicated, GitLab Duo Agent Platform, MCP-based external agents, APIs, and developer tooling.
• Turn complex platform opportunities into customer problems, measurable outcomes, and investment decisions. Use evidence to decide where to invest, iterate, partner, or stop.
• Partner with Engineering and Design on architecture and implementation tradeoffs across graph data models, indexing, query systems, application programming interfaces (APIs), Model Context Protocol (MCP), authorization, and scale.
• Use AI tools such as Claude Code and GitLab to investigate problems, explore code and data, prototype concepts, and create or review merge requests when that's the fastest way to learn.
• Lead discovery with developers, engineering leaders, platform teams, security teams, and technical executives to validate needs around dependencies, ownership, change impact, vulnerability exposure, pipeline health, and software delivery risk. Build repeatable feedback into roadmap decisions and help customers understand the value of connected graph context over disconnected searches or API calls.
• Define target customers, priority use cases, differentiated value, and the path to product-market fit. Partner with Product Marketing, Sales, Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Pricing, and Finance on positioning, packaging, pricing, launch, adoption, and expansion.
• Develop business cases and track adoption, retention, usage, customer value, and revenue outcomes. Support executive briefings, analyst conversations, customer workshops, and field enablement.
• Align teams and executive leaders around clear recommendations and tradeoffs without relying on direct authority. Mentor other product managers, share practical frameworks, and represent GitLab's product vision in customer and industry conversations.

What you'll bring

• Experience owning complex technical products or platforms at Staff, Principal, or equivalent scope, with a track record of defining vision and roadmaps across multiple teams.
• Deep technical fluency in one or more relevant areas, such as developer tools, DevOps, software delivery, data platforms, distributed systems, knowledge graphs, search, APIs, AI infrastructure, or agentic systems.
• The ability to work credibly with engineers on architecture, data models, APIs, scale, reliability, and security.
• Business judgment and experience in market assessment, product strategy, pricing, packaging, business cases, or commercialization of technical products.
• Experience taking a product, platform, or category from early concept through launch, customer adoption, and iteration.
• A customer-first approach and the ability to build trusted relationships with technical practitioners, engineering leaders, architects, and executives.
• Clear written and verbal communication, with experience explaining complex ideas, influencing across functions, and resolving competing priorities in ambiguous work.
• Practical experience using AI tools in product work, including exploring code and data, prototyping workflows, and creating or reviewing merge requests. You take ownership, learn quickly, and move between strategy and implementation detail.

About the team

In GitLab's Analytics organization, we focus on making Orbit's context available through GitLab experiences, developer tools, MCP, APIs, and the command-line interface (CLI).

Our challenge is to turn complex, connected data into useful, trustworthy context for engineers and agents. You'll work with engineering and cross-functional partners who value technical rigor, clear product thinking, rapid learning, and direct customer contact. As part of GitLab's all-remote organization, we collaborate asynchronously across regions, with a focus on transparency, written communication, and clear decisions.