Staff Solutions Architect, AI Subject Matter Expert

Overview

As a Subject Matter Expert (SME), you will 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.

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.
• Contribute product-specific content and expertise to customer PoVs owned by Account SAs, 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 need

• 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.

Nice to have

• Public speaking, published technical content, open source contributions, or relevant certifications in Kubernetes, cloud architecture, or security.
• Transferable experience in an adjacent domain.

Details

• Location: Remote, United States. Base salary range for US residents: $166,200 to $279,900 USD, excluding bonuses, equity, and benefits.
• Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.
• Team is distributed and all-remote.
• All roles are remote, though some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements.