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Salary: USD 166,200 - 279,900 / annual
GitLab is seeking a Staff Solutions Architect to serve as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in AI-assisted development and competitive displacement. You will be the deepest technical voice for your product group, engaging with GitLab's largest and most complex customer opportunities (top 10% by size/complexity).
In this role, you'll partner with Account Solutions Architects who own customer relationships, while you own your product group's technical success within those opportunities. You'll work directly with Product and Engineering teams, bringing customer needs and field insights into roadmap discussions. You'll also build expertise across the wider Solutions Architecture team through reusable assets, enablement, and coaching.
Key responsibilities include:
- Act as the technical authority on prioritized opportunities, from discovery and architecture through trials and Proof of Value (PoV) evaluations
- Lead technical deep dives, workshops, and executive briefings that connect product capabilities to business outcomes and explain GitLab's competitive differentiation
- Design and improve standardized PoV templates with clear success criteria
- Equip account teams for product launches with Product Management and Product Marketing; build demos, talk tracks, and turn early wins into reference stories
- Serve as the escalation point for Account SAs and Post-Sales SAs on complex product questions, integrations, and objections
- Hand off PoV success criteria and architecture decisions to Post-Sales teams when opportunities close; stay involved until customers' first production workload uses the product
- Bring structured field feedback, competitive insights, and customer requirements to Product Management and Engineering; help manage early-access and design-partner programs
- Represent GitLab through customer events, conferences, industry working groups, and published content
- Build reference architectures, demo environments, competitive battlecards, PoV playbooks, and enablement content; mentor Account SAs and contribute to GitLab's global SME community
Your success will be measured by technical win rate and bookings on SME-engaged opportunities, product-category commit attainment and consumption growth, PoV conversion rate, evaluation cycle time, time from technical win to production use, Account SA reuse of your assets, their confidence handling your product group without escalation, and the quality and impact of your feedback to Product.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Substantial experience in technical pre-sales, solutions architecture, consulting, or software engineering, with deep, hands-on expertise in one domain: application security testing, supply chain security and compliance; scalable cloud and hybrid platforms; large CI/CD environments and source code migrations; or production AI-assisted development, working prototypes, and competitive evaluations
- Practical expertise in agentic and AI-assisted development workflows across planning, coding, testing, security, and delivery, applied in a customer-facing, pre-sales context
- Experience winning technical decisions on large, complex enterprise opportunities through structured Proof of Concept (PoC) or PoV evaluations with defined success criteria and executive sign-off
- Hands-on experience with Git, CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, and at least one major cloud provider
- Ability to lead a whiteboard session with engineers and present the business case to executives in the same meeting
- Strong written communication, including the ability to turn complex topics into clear playbooks that others use
- Comfort working asynchronously across time zones with Sales, Product, and Engineering
- Optional: public speaking, published technical content, open source contributions, or relevant certifications in Kubernetes, cloud architecture, or security
- Transferable experience in adjacent domains is encouraged
