Principal Engineer, Monetization Engineering at GitLab

Role Overview

GitLab, the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, is looking for a Principal Engineer to define and drive the next generation of GitLab's Fulfillment platform. Fulfillment is critical as it ensures customers receive the correct product access and manages seats, usage, and spend across GitLab.com, Self-Managed, and Dedicated deployment models. The core responsibilities of this platform involve entitlements, licensing and provisioning, seat management, usage visibility, and cost management.

This existing platform has been in service for about a decade and currently faces significant challenges related to scale, maintainability, and architectural complexity. As a senior player-coach, you will help us understand the current state and define the vision for Fulfillment over the next ten years. This role requires you to set the architectural direction across the Fulfillment portfolio, make critical technical decisions, and work alongside teams to execute the modernization strategy.

You will be influential across organizational boundaries while remaining hands-on in design, implementation, technical problem-solving, and mentorship.

What You Will 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.

What You Will Bring

• 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, covering areas like entitlements, licensing, provisioning, subscription lifecycle, seat management, usage metering, usage billing, or cost controls.
• A proven track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams and successfully turning architecture into reliable, operated systems.
• Deep expertise 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 capability to navigate both Backend and Frontend in a polyglot system.
• Practical experience utilizing artificial intelligence in software engineering, such as 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 investments to customer experience, revenue, operational efficiency, risk reduction, and time to market.
• Excellent written communication and the ability to influence senior stakeholders across teams even without formal authority.

Compensation and Benefits

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently intended for residents of the United States only. This range reflects the base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range: $223,000 - $317,000 USD

How GitLab Supports Full Time Employees

• 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