Principal Engineer, Monetization Engineering - GitLab

GitLab is looking for a Principal Engineer to help define and drive the next generation of GitLab’s Fulfillment platform.

Fulfillment ensures that customers receive the right product access and can manage seats, usage, and spend across GitLab.com, Self-Managed, Dedicated, and other deployment models. Its core areas include entitlements, licensing and provisioning, seat management, usage visibility, and cost management.

This is a senior player-coach role where you will set architectural direction across the Fulfillment portfolio, make critical technical decisions, and work directly with teams to execute the modernization strategy.

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 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.
• Mentor and coach Senior and Staff Engineers and raise the quality of technical decision-making across the organization.

What You'll Bring

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

Benefits & Compensation

• Base salary range: $223,000 - $317,000 USD (US residents; country-specific ranges apply elsewhere)
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave
• Comprehensive health, financial, and well-being benefits