GitLab co-founder Dmitriy Zaporozhets steps aside from the company

GitLab co-founder and author of the company’s original idea Dmitriy Zaporozhets has announced that he is stepping aside from his role as an Engineering Fellow. At the start of GitLab, he was CTO of the company and later switched to the Engineering Fellow position.

On October 14, 2021, GitLab became a publicly traded company on Nasdaq. Now the company is worth more than $18.4 billion. Zaporozhets is the owner of a 2.5% stake in the company, which equals $450 million.

At the start of the business, Zaporozhets told GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij that he wanted to commit ten years to the company. Coincidentally, ten years later, in October 2021, the company went public.

“Today, I want to share with the GitLab community that I am stepping away from my position as an Engineering Fellow at GitLab Inc. I have fulfilled my 10-year vision, and I feel that I can step away with so much pride in what GitLab has become and so much faith in where GitLab is headed,” he writes.

Dmitry also talks about how the company has changed over this time and how his role in it has changed accordingly:

“I came to work at GitLab full time in 2013. A team member recently asked me what my job title was when I started working at GitLab full time. The answer: it was Dmitriy. I didn’t have a formal title in the beginning.

My first official title with the company was Chief Technology Officer. Quite a lot happened during that time. I wrote a lot of code, merged a lot of merge requests. I still have the highest number of commits in the main repository. I worked closely with the first front-end developer and the first UX designer, and we were building everything from scratch.

By October of 2018, the company grew to the size when the CTO couldn’t write the code anymore. I transitioned into my role as Engineering Fellow and worked on several new features in the product.

It has been an amazing experience to be a part of GitLab’s evolution into The DevOps Platform. From the simple source control software to the platform that helps you deliver better software faster. I am very glad to have been a part of GitLab’s growth […]. It was an honor to be in New York City last month to help Sid ring the opening bell at Nasdaq and see GitLab become a publicly traded company.”

“It has been an incredible 10 years since you started the project. Thank you for creating GitLab, making it open source, joining me on this journey and caring for GitLab for the last 10 years. It was an amazing experience to ring the opening bell with you at Nasdaq and I’m excited to continue to build upon what we’ve created thus far and lead GitLab through its next phase. While you are leaving your position as Engineering Fellow, I know that we will still keep in touch, and your legacy will live on through the company and the wider community,” writes Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab.