Staff Solutions Architect - AI Subject Matter Expert

An overview of this role

As a Subject Matter Expert (SME), you'll be the deepest technical voice in the field for one product group, helping customers make technical decisions on GitLab's most important opportunities, roughly the top 10% by size or complexity.

Account Solutions Architects (Account SAs) will bring you into prioritized opportunities. The Account SA owns the opportunity; you own your product group's success within it. You'll work directly with Product and Engineering, bringing customer needs and field insights into roadmap discussions. You'll also help the wider Solutions Architecture team build expertise through reusable assets, enablement, and coaching.

You'll specialize in one product group, not all four. In Security & Compliance, you'll focus on GitLab Ultimate, application security, Dependency Firewall, software supply chain security, compliance, and artificial intelligence (AI) governance. In Platform, you'll focus on GitLab Dedicated, self-managed deployments, bring your own model, and cloud and hybrid architecture. In Core DevSecOps, you'll focus on GitLab Premium, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), source code management, Orbit, Artifact Central, and migrations. DevSecOps brings development, security, and operations together across software delivery. In AI & Competitive, you'll focus on GitLab Duo Agent Platform, agentic workflows, AI-native development, competitive displacement including GitHub, and migrations.

Your success will be measured by technical win rate and bookings on SME-engaged opportunities, product-category commit attainment and consumption growth in your region, and Proof of Value (PoV) conversion rate, evaluation cycle time, and time from technical win to production use. We'll also measure how often Account SAs reuse your assets, their confidence in handling your product group without escalation, and the quality and impact of your feedback to Product.

What you’ll do

• Act as the technical authority for your product group on prioritized opportunities, from discovery and architecture through trials and PoV evaluations.
• Lead technical deep dives, workshops, and executive briefings that connect product capabilities to business outcomes and explain how GitLab differs from competing solutions.
• Design and improve standardized PoV templates with clear, repeatable success criteria. Account SAs own the customer PoV; you'll contribute product-specific content and expertise while keeping the evaluation connected to the broader GitLab platform.
• Equip account teams for product launches with Product Management and Product Marketing. Build demos and talk tracks, and turn early customer wins into reference stories.
• Serve as the escalation point for Account SAs and Post-Sales Solutions Architects (Post-Sales SAs) on complex product questions, integrations, and objections.
• Hand off PoV success criteria and architecture decisions to the Post-Sales SA with the account team when an opportunity closes. Stay involved until the customer's first production workload uses the product, and support complex accounts when Post-Sales SAs bring you in to drive adoption and consumption.
• Bring structured field feedback, competitive insights, and customer requirements to Product Management and Engineering with the wider SME team. Help manage early-access and design-partner programs, and represent GitLab through customer events, conferences, industry working groups, and published content.
• Build reference architectures, demo environments, competitive battlecards, PoV playbooks, and enablement content so account teams can handle more opportunities without your direct involvement. Mentor Account SAs and contribute to GitLab's global SME community of practice.

What you’ll bring

• 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.
• The 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.

If you bring transferable experience in an adjacent domain, we encourage you to apply.

About the team

We're building our SME organization within GitLab's Solutions Architecture team, and we're distributed and all-remote.

How GitLab will support you

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off 
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental leave
• Home office support