Principal Engineer, Monetization Engineering

Overview

Principal Engineer to define and drive the next generation of GitLab's Fulfillment platform, covering entitlements, licensing and provisioning, seat management, usage visibility, and cost management, and to set its architecture over the next ten years. This is a senior player-coach role.

What you'll do

• Define and communicate the long-term architecture and technical strategy for Fulfillment, including target state, principles, priorities, and migration sequencing.
• Assess the current platform and address its most important risks across scale, reliability, performance, data correctness, operability, and maintainability.
• Drive architectural decisions across entitlements, provisioning, seat management, usage visibility, and cost management.
• Establish clear service boundaries, data ownership, contracts, and integration patterns across Fulfillment, Monetization, billing, Salesforce, and product services.
• Lead an incremental modernization program that improves the existing platform while continuing to deliver customer and business value.
• Partner with Engineering Managers, Product Management, and cross-functional stakeholders to turn architectural direction into executable roadmaps and shipped outcomes.
• Be hands-on with the hardest problems, including prototypes, critical implementations, migrations, performance improvements, reliability work, and incident learning.
• Champion practical artificial intelligence (AI) adoption across Fulfillment, including agentic coding and AI-assisted engineering workflows, and help teams apply these tools responsibly and effectively.
• Mentor and coach Senior and Staff Engineers and raise the quality of technical decision-making across the organization.
• Take part in on-call or operational support where your team's ownership model requires it.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience at Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical leadership level.
• Direct experience building, operating, or modernizing Fulfillment systems, including areas such as entitlements, licensing, provisioning, subscription lifecycle, seat management, usage metering, usage billing, or cost controls.
• A track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams and turning architecture into reliable, operated systems.
• Deep experience with distributed systems, scalability, availability, performance, observability, data integrity, and failure-mode analysis.
• Comfort working in one or more of Ruby, Go, and Python, with the ability to navigate both Backend and Frontend in a polyglot system.
• Practical experience using artificial intelligence in software engineering, including agentic coding or AI-assisted development workflows.
• Demonstrated success modernizing mature or degraded platforms without relying on a risky "big bang" rewrite.
• Experience designing systems that span multiple deployment models, such as software as a service, Self-Managed, Dedicated, or disconnected environments.
• Strong product and business judgment, with the ability to connect technical investment to customer experience, revenue, operational efficiency, risk reduction, and time to market.
• Excellent written communication and the ability to influence senior stakeholders across teams without formal authority.

Details

• Location: Remote, Canada; Remote, United States.
• Base salary range for US residents: $223,000 to $317,000 USD (base only; excludes bonuses, equity, and benefits).
• Role is hiring under GitLab's remote model, with some roles carrying location-based eligibility requirements.