Director, Sales Incentive Compensation

An overview of this role

As the Director of Sales Incentive Compensation, you'll own how GitLab designs, operates, and improves incentive programs that power a high-performance, values-driven Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) organization. You'll turn our go-to-market and revenue strategy into clear, fair, and competitive compensation plans that are easy to understand and administer for Sales, Customer Success, Professional Services, Channel/Partnerships, and Revenue Operations roles. You'll report to the VP of Revenue Strategy and Operations and partner closely with the CRO staff, Finance, and Legal to lead the full lifecycle of sales incentive design, analytics, governance, and communication.

What you’ll do

• Own the end-to-end incentive compensation strategy for the Chief Revenue Officer organization, aligning plans with GitLab’s go-to-market and revenue priorities.
• Lead the annual sales compensation design cycle with CRO staff, Sales and Customer Success leaders, and Finance, translating business objectives into clear, scalable incentive structures.
• Design, document, and maintain role-specific compensation frameworks, including base/variable mix, quota-to-on-target-earnings ratios, accelerators, decelerators, thresholds, performance tiers, and targeted spiffs or special programs.
• Develop and run governance for sales incentive programs, including plan approval workflows, exception and dispute handling, policy standards, and change management processes across all regions.
• Build and manage analytics and reporting on plan performance. Use payout distributions, attainment curves, and cost-per-dollar-sold to recommend data-driven changes to plans and quotas.
• Partner with Revenue Strategy and Operations, Sales Analytics, and Finance/FP&A to model scenarios, align compensation assumptions with planning and forecasting, and support accurate accruals and budget management.
• Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, and regional business partners to ensure plans and processes meet regulatory requirements and support consistent, fair administration globally.
• Lead communication and enablement for incentive programs, including plan documentation, training for leaders and field teams, and ongoing support so GitLab team members clearly understand plan mechanics and how they earn.

What you’ll bring

• Experience designing, operating, and improving sales incentive compensation programs for diverse go-to-market roles, including Sales, Customer Success, Professional Services, Channel/Partner, and Revenue Operations.
• Background advising CROs and senior revenue leaders on incentive design, trade-offs, and policy, with a focus on driving desired behaviors while maintaining equity, competitiveness, and cost discipline.
• Experience scaling global incentive programs through growth, organizational change, and evolving revenue strategies in complex, multi-region environments.
• Strong analytical and financial modeling skills, including interpreting performance and market data, running scenario and sensitivity analyses, and turning insights into clear recommendations for senior stakeholders.
• Attention to detail and accuracy when working with complex compensation data, quota models, attainment distributions, and plan documentation, with an emphasis on consistency and compliance.
• Clear and practical communication skills, with the ability to explain plan mechanics and policy implications to both technical and non-technical audiences and build understanding and trust in incentive programs.
• Alignment with GitLab’s values, including integrity, confidentiality in all compensation matters, transparency, and collaborative decision-making across the CRO organization.
• Familiarity with sales compensation and analytics tools (for example, Xactly, CaptivateIQ, Varicent) and productivity tools such as Google Workspace, with openness to applying transferable skills from related revenue operations roles.

About the team

The Revenue Strategy and Operations team at GitLab designs, manages, and improves incentive compensation programs for the Chief Revenue Officer organization. We are a small, highly collaborative, all-remote team that partners closely with Sales Leadership, Customer Success, Professional Services, Channel/Partnerships, Revenue Operations, and Finance across regions. Together we align plan design, quota-to-OTE frameworks, incentive operations, and annual plan rollout with GitLab's broader revenue strategy. We focus on building scalable, data-driven, and transparent compensation structures that support growth, reinforce GitLab's values, and stay equitable and compliant as the business evolves.