Customer Success Architect, Japan

Overview

As a Customer Success Architect, you will serve as a trusted strategic advisor and technical authority to some of GitLab's most complex and high-value Enterprise and Government customers across Japan, driving adoption of GitLab's intelligent DevSecOps platform after the sale.

What you'll do

• Own a book of Enterprise and Government customers and drive adoption, retention, expansion, and overall satisfaction through ongoing strategic, business and technical engagement.
• Serve as the senior post-sales strategic, business and technical advisor for a portfolio of GitLab's most complex, highest-value enterprise and Government accounts, shaping multi-year platform and DevSecOps strategy in partnership with customer executives.
• Coordinate responses to questions, issues, and escalations across Support, Product Management, Sales, and Professional Services.
• Translate ambiguous, high-stakes business outcomes into rigorous Customer Success Plans that are regularly reviewed with customer stakeholders, containing business outcome goals, quantifiable benefits, realistic adoption milestones and remediation actions.
• Prepare executive-ready reporting conducted on a regular basis with clear accountability for outcomes that demonstrate impact on adoption, retention, and expansion of GitLab products and services.
• Provide deep technical guidance on enterprise-scale CI/CD architecture, DevSecOps maturity models, and platform consolidation strategy, including advising on trade-offs such as multi-cloud vs. hybrid and self-managed vs. GitLab Dedicated.
• Lead end-to-end resolution of critical, cross-functional account escalations, ensuring root causes are identified, follow-up actions are owned, internal teams are held accountable to timelines, and executive communication and risk are managed.
• Design and deliver technical enablement programs at scale, identifying systemic maturity gaps across a portfolio and building the roadmap that closes them.
• Advise key customer stakeholders on cloud and platform architecture decisions with enterprise-wide impact, including multi-region deployment strategy, secrets management architecture and network/security topology for regulated environments.
• Guide customers on GitLab platform best practices including Git workflows, branching strategies, CI/CD pipeline design, DevSecOps adoption patterns, and security scanning configuration.
• Provide hands-on technical enablement and onboarding, including education on GitLab features, releases, and use cases, and identify training and maturity opportunities aligned to customer goals.
• Engage customers on cloud platform architecture decisions relevant to their GitLab deployment, including self-managed vs. GitLab Dedicated, Runner configuration and auto-scaling, secrets management, and network topology.
• Advise customers on DevSecOps consolidation value, articulating the TCO, compliance, and developer experience case for platform consolidation over fragmented toolchains.
• Collaborate with Professional Services, Sales, and internal teams to identify expansion opportunities, recommend enablement interventions, and ensure a seamless customer journey from onboarding through renewal.

What you'll need

• Must be a Japanese citizen based in Japan.
• Mandatory Japanese (native or professional level) and English language proficiency.
• Hands-on experience building or owning CI/CD pipelines end to end, including pipeline as code, multi-stage design, artifact management, and troubleshooting in real-world environments.
• A career built across direct customer-facing engagement roles such as Technical Account Management, Technical Solution Sales, Pre-sales, Business Development, Consulting, or Professional Services, across customers in different industry verticals such as Government, Banking, Financial and Insurance Services, Manufacturing, and Telecommunications.
• Experience with technology and platform transitions such as on-premise to Cloud, monolith to microservices, and Waterfall to DevOps to DevSecOps.
• A long-standing demonstrated track record of Enterprise or Government account ownership, including handling genuine account crises.
• Credible judgment earned by personally owning the outcomes of dozens of complex enterprise customer account engagements, including situations with real commercial, technical, and reputational stakes.
• A consistent track record of being trusted by customer executives and internal leadership to operate with minimal oversight in ambiguous and high-pressure situations.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in DevSecOps practices, including shift-left security and integrating SAST, DAST, SCA, and container scanning into development workflows, and architecting and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines at enterprise scale.
• Expert-level understanding of Git, merge request workflows and delivery lifecycles, including guiding organizations through branching strategies such as trunk-based development and GitFlow.
• Demonstrated experience with infrastructure as code, GitOps, and cloud and on-premises environments supporting GitLab deployments, including networking, identity and access management (IAM), secrets management, and deployment considerations for regulated or high-security environments.
• Demonstrated experience partnering with customers to turn business requirements into actionable success plans with measurable goals and verifiable business outcomes suitable for executive-level quarterly reporting.
• Demonstrated ability to drive product adoption, dive deep into assigned accounts, and scale out the level of influence in the account.
• Demonstrated ability to build and defend executive-level business cases (TCO, compliance, risk) that influence budget and platform strategy decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to operate with autonomy in ambiguous, high-stakes situations with strong communication, stakeholder management, and organizational experience to manage a portfolio of enterprise and Government customers and coordinate across customer and internal cross-functional teams.

Details

• Location: Remote, Japan.
• All GitLab roles are remote; some roles carry specific location-based eligibility requirements.