Principal Engineer, Monetization Engineering

Remote · USD 223,000-317,000 · 10+ years experience · Remote · Posted Oct 19, 2026

At a glance

The Principal Engineer for Monetization Engineering will define and drive the next generation of GitLab’s Fulfillment platform.
This senior player-coach role involves setting architectural direction, making critical technical decisions, and leading the modernization of systems responsible for entitlements, licensing, and provisioning.
The role requires hands-on technical leadership to solve complex scaling and architectural challenges while mentoring senior and staff engineers.

Define and communicate the long-term architecture and technical strategy for Fulfillment.
Assess the current platform to address risks regarding scale, reliability, performance, data correctness, 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 to improve the existing platform.
Partner with Engineering Managers and Product Management to turn architectural direction into executable roadmaps.
Perform hands-on work including prototyping, critical implementations, migrations, and incident learning.
Champion practical AI adoption, including agentic coding and AI-assisted engineering workflows.
Mentor and coach Senior and Staff Engineers to raise the quality of technical decision-making.

10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Substantial experience at Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical leadership level.
Direct experience building, operating, or modernizing Fulfillment systems (e.g., entitlements, licensing, provisioning, subscription lifecycle, seat management, usage metering, usage billing, or cost controls).
Track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams.
Deep experience with distributed systems, scalability, availability, performance, observability, data integrity, and failure-mode analysis.
Comfort working in Ruby, Go, and Python, with the ability to navigate both Backend and Frontend.
Practical experience using artificial intelligence 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 that span multiple deployment models (SaaS, Self-Managed, Dedicated, or disconnected environments).
Excellent written communication and the ability to influence senior stakeholders without formal authority.