Principal Engineer, Monetization Engineering

GitLab

15h•$223,000 - $317,000•Remote

About The Position

GitLab is seeking a Principal Engineer to define and drive the next generation of its Fulfillment platform. Fulfillment helps customers receive the right product access and 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. The existing platform has been in place for approximately a decade and faces challenges in scale, maintainability, and architectural complexity. This senior player-coach role will assess the current platform and define how Fulfillment should operate over the next ten years. The Principal Engineer will set architectural direction across the portfolio, make critical technical decisions, and work directly with teams to carry out modernization while remaining hands-on in design, implementation, technical problem-solving, and mentorship. GitLab is a remote company and expects team members to incorporate AI into their daily workflows. This role will champion practical, responsible AI adoption across Fulfillment, including agentic coding and AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Requirements

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, 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, and ability to navigate both Backend and Frontend in a polyglot system.
Practical experience using AI 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 spanning multiple deployment models, such as software as a service, Self-Managed, Dedicated, or disconnected environments.
Strong product and business judgment, connecting technical investment to customer experience, revenue, operational efficiency, risk reduction, and time to market.
Excellent written communication and ability to influence senior stakeholders across teams without formal authority.

Responsibilities

Define and communicate Fulfillment’s long-term architecture and technical strategy, including target state, principles, priorities, and migration sequencing.
Assess the current platform and address key risks involving scale, reliability, performance, data correctness, operability, and maintainability.
Drive architectural decisions across entitlements, provisioning, seat management, usage visibility, and cost management.
Establish service boundaries, data ownership, contracts, and integration patterns across Fulfillment, Monetization, billing, Salesforce, and product services.
Lead incremental platform modernization 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.
Work hands-on on difficult problems, including prototypes, critical implementations, migrations, performance improvements, reliability work, and incident learning.
Champion practical AI adoption across Fulfillment, including agentic coding and AI-assisted engineering workflows, and help teams use these tools responsibly and effectively.
Mentor and coach Senior and Staff Engineers and improve the quality of technical decision-making across the organization.