cover_letter / art_2-9ns0CBji4

Dear GitLab Security Product Team, GitLab sits at a rare intersection: a platform trusted by more than 50 million developers and more than half the Fortune 100, where security is not a bolt-on but a first-class citizen of the DevSecOps lifecycle. That positioning matters because the gap between security tooling that ships and security tooling that actually gets adopted is where most enterprise value is lost — and closing that gap is exactly the kind of problem I have spent my career solving. My work scaling Intuit's developer platform to 675M+ annual engagements taught me that adoption is a product problem as much as a GTM problem, and that the two cannot be solved in isolation. **Technical and Product Foundation** My product leadership has always been grounded in hands-on technical depth. At Intuit, I owned the developer frameworks and platform infrastructure that underpinned QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. I drove 275% YoY growth in ICE platform engagements, scaled throughput from 6K to 50K TPS via an rSocket migration supporting approximately 1.5 million concurrent connections at sub-25ms TP99, and delivered the ICE Self-Service platform that compressed developer onboarding from two to three weeks down to minutes in pre-production and under 24 hours for production — while mitigating more than $1M in projected opex growth. These were not feature launches; they were business-performance interventions that required diagnosing adoption blockers, aligning engineering and GTM partners, and recommending solutions across product, pricing, and positioning levers simultaneously. At Splunk, I owned Search Service (Go microservices), Search Catalog, and Splunk Processing Language (SPL/SPL2) for Splunk Cloud Services — a security-adjacent data platform where I delivered the Scheduler Service end-to-end in approximately four months and led a query performance optimization initiative that achieved up to 10x improvements for a beta enterprise customer. I also designed a repeatable RICE-based prioritization framework across three microservice backlogs, balancing internal partner, third-party developer, and Fortune 500 customer requirements — the same kind of cross-portfolio alignment this role demands. Earlier, at Kaiser Permanente, I led the enterprise rollout of Splunk Logging-as-a-Service at 1.7 TB daily volume across 200+ internal customers, and built caching infrastructure using Redis and XC10 to address scalability and fault-tolerance challenges at scale. That experience gave me direct exposure to the operational security and observability concerns that enterprise security buyers care about most. **Why This Role** The Principal PM, Security - GTM role is explicitly designed for someone who has moved beyond feature delivery and wants to make products successful in the market — diagnosing where growth is working, where it is blocked, and what combination of product changes, pricing, packaging, or positioning will move the needle. That framing matches precisely how I think about product leadership. My track record spans investigations into business performance (enterprise-wide service language assessment presented to Intuit's CTO), cross-functional alignment across CS, SA, engineering, finance, and analytics, and hands-on work with SQL and BigQuery to surface developer pain points across approximately 20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs. **What Excites Me About This Specific Opportunity** GitLab's security portfolio spans application security scanning, cloud security, and compliance — capabilities that are deeply integrated into the platform rather than standalone point solutions. The opportunity to guide discovery on shared customer problems across scanners and adjacent security capabilities, reduce duplication across product managers, and build momentum toward more cohesive solutions is exactly the kind of systems-level product challenge I find most compelling. I am also drawn to the explicit expectation that this role will mentor other PMs in GTM problem-solving — I have done this as an adjunct faculty member at De Anza College and as a speaker at DeveloperWeek 2022 and Splunk .conf, and I believe building product leadership capability is as important as any individual roadmap decision. **Selected Relevant Experience** - Delivered ICE Self-Service platform (DevPortal, GitOps config, ICE Playground), reducing developer onboarding from 2–3 weeks to minutes in pre-prod and under 24 hours for production, while mitigating $1M+ in projected opex growth — a direct example of diagnosing an adoption blocker and solving it across product, tooling, and documentation levers. - Achieved 275% YoY growth in ICE engagements, scaling to 675M+ in FY23 across QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma — driven by cross-functional alignment with engineering, CS, and finance, not feature additions alone. - Conducted enterprise-wide Service Language Assessment across 9 languages, analyzing usage data and developer feedback to inform strategic investment decisions presented to the CTO — the same pattern of data-driven portfolio analysis this role requires across GitLab's security capabilities. - Led query performance optimization initiative at Splunk for a Fortune 500 beta customer, achieving up to 10x performance improvements — requiring close partnership with Solutions Architecture and Customer Success to translate field feedback into engineering priorities. - Implemented ICE Presence in async chat, generating $480K/month in additional invoicing — a commercial outcome driven by identifying an underutilized product capability and aligning GTM execution around it. - Designed repeatable RICE-based prioritization framework across three microservice backlogs at Splunk, balancing internal partner, third-party developer, and Fortune 500 customer requirements — directly applicable to leading prioritization discussions across GitLab's security R&D and product leaders. - Led enterprise rollout of Splunk Logging-as-a-Service at 1.7 TB daily volume across 200+ internal enterprise customers at Kaiser Permanente — providing direct exposure to the operational security and observability requirements of large-scale enterprise buyers. **Closing** GitLab's mission — to enable organizations to ship better, more secure software faster — is one I want to contribute to at the level this role demands. The security market is crowded with point solutions that win on features and lose on adoption. GitLab's integrated platform approach is the right long-term answer, and the work of this role — connecting product strategy to business performance, aligning overlapping efforts, and translating field and customer insight into clear direction — is where I can contribute most. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background maps to the specific challenges your security portfolio is navigating. Sincerely, **O. Felix Amoruwa** famoruwa@berkeley.edu | 909-731-9011 | felixamoruwa.info