Senior Director, Solution Architecture - North America

An overview of this role

As the Senior Director, Solutions Architects, you will lead a team that helps prospects, customers, and partners understand how GitLab can meet their technical requirements and business goals. In this role, you will sit at the intersection of technical sales leadership, team development, and operational scale. You will guide strategy for technical evaluations, workshops, demos, and proof-of-concept engagements, while building the structure and support we need for the team to grow and perform at a high level.

This is a leader of leaders role where you will manage a team of managers, not individual contributors, and be expected to develop and elevate those managers as leaders in their own right. We are looking for a transformational leader who thrives in ambiguity, brings a self-starting mindset, and has a demonstrated track record of driving change and building high-performing organizations in rapidly growing, evolving businesses.

You will work closely with Sales, Partners, Customer Success, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Services, and Sales Operations to improve how we communicate GitLab's value in customer-facing technical engagements. You will also help strengthen regional planning, executive relationships, and field feedback loops so that our Solutions Architects organization can support current priorities while scaling for future growth. This is a key leadership opportunity to help GitLab deliver a clear, credible technical story for the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform.

What you'll do

• Develop strategy and operations to improve win rates by helping teams discover, explain, and demonstrate how GitLab meets customer requirements and desired business outcomes.
• Lead initiatives that scale the organization and its operating model to support future growth.
• Create and improve processes, metrics, and key performance indicators for technical evaluations, workshops, demos, and proof-of-concept engagements.
• Partner with Sales and Partner teams to align on strategy, priorities, and support for specific prospects, customers, and partners.
• Build strong relationships with key customers at the technical sponsor and executive level.
• Work with Enterprise sales leadership in US, Canada & LATAM to support account plans, strategies, and quarterly goals.
• Collaborate with Customer Success, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Services, and Sales Operations to improve engagement models, team enablement, and field feedback loops.
• Hire, mentor, and develop an exceptional team of Solutions Architects and managers.
• Drive organizational transformation by proactively identifying gaps, building structure where none exists, and leading change without waiting for top-down direction.

What you'll bring

• Progressive leadership experience including substantial time as a second or third-line leader (managing managers) in technical sales, Solutions Architecture, or Sales Engineering organizations.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity and rapid organizational change, bringing clarity and direction to teams even when strategy is still forming.
• Experience building and leading teams of managers in complex, distributed organizations.
• Strong experience improving strategy and operations for technical assessment processes, technical evaluations, and team enablement.
• Knowledge of software development lifecycle practices and tools, including agile and DevOps ways of working.
• Technical familiarity with cloud and security concepts, such as Kubernetes, Docker, static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and cloud deployment models including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.
• Experience selling technical solutions to technical practitioners, managers, and executive stakeholders.
• Proven ability to partner across functions, including Sales, Partners, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Success, and Services.
• A self-starting, entrepreneurial approach — you don't wait for a playbook; you write it.

About the team

The Solutions Architects team serves as a trusted technical partner for the field, helping strengthen customer confidence in GitLab's platform approach and supporting successful engagements across the customer journey. Their work connects technical credibility with customer trust, giving internal teams a strong partner in complex sales motions.

This team works in close partnership with go-to-market and product organizations, bringing customer feedback from the field into broader conversations about product direction, services, enablement, and value messaging. As a distributed team in an all-remote environment, they rely on clear communication, strong judgment, and shared operating practices to support teams and customers across regions. It is an important team for GitLab's continued growth because it combines technical depth, leadership, customer trust, and operational excellence. For more information, check out the Solution Architecture Handbook.

Originally posted on Himalayas