An overview of this role

As the Senior Director, Field CTOs at GitLab, you will lead a small, senior team of Field CTOs while continuing to operate as one yourself. You will help shape the technical voice in GitLab's most strategic customer conversations, guide how the team engages across regions, and turn what we learn in the field into useful input for sales leadership, product, and marketing. Reporting into go-to-market leadership within the Chief Revenue Officer organization, you will partner closely with the executive teams of GitLab's largest customers.

This is a player-coach role. You will personally engage on GitLab's most strategic accounts and highest-impact pursuits, while also building, developing, and running a distributed global team. Your time will be split between leading the team and shaping cross-functional strategy, and working directly with customers, executive stakeholders, and external audiences through meetings, events, and written thought leadership.

This team works at the intersection of DevSecOps strategy, AI for software development, application security, compliance, and platform modernization. The leaders you and your team advise include Chief Information Security Officers, Chief Security Officers, Chief Technology Officers, chief architects, and leaders in platform engineering and developer productivity. You will serve these leaders by providing clear technical guidance, offering pragmatic recommendations, and communicating tradeoffs transparently.

In this role, you will operate where technology strategy, customer engagement, market leadership, and team development meet. In your first year, you will strengthen the Field CTO operating model, improve how the team is deployed to the highest-value opportunities, and raise the quality and consistency of executive engagement across regions. This is a unique opportunity to help customers understand the value of a single DevSecOps platform while representing GitLab with clarity, transparency, and results.

What you’ll do

• Lead the global Field CTO team by hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical leaders who engage with GitLab's most strategic customers and opportunities.
• Set the operating model for the team, including how engagements are scoped, how Field CTOs are matched to accounts and regions, and how insights are documented and shared.
• Coach a team of senior individual contributors through regular one-on-ones, peer review, and clear development plans focused on judgment, executive presence, and strategic impact.
• Personally engage as the senior technical voice on a portfolio of GitLab's most strategic accounts, supporting complex pre-sales motions and executive-level customer relationships.
• Deliver thought leadership on DevSecOps, AI for software development, security, compliance, and platform modernization through customer briefings, presentations, events, and written content.
• Partner with sales leadership, sales engineering, customer success, product, and marketing as a peer to align the Field CTO function with broader go-to-market priorities.
• Represent GitLab externally with analysts, media, and industry audiences, and internally in executive forums where field perspective should help shape company decisions.
• Curate feedback from the field and turn it into actionable input for product direction, marketing narratives, sales strategy, enablement materials, and reusable technical content.

What you’ll bring

• Experience leading a senior, customer-facing technical team such as Field CTO, Principal Solutions Architect, Principal Sales Engineer, or Distinguished Engineer, with success developing senior individual contributors across regions and time zones.
• Strong people leadership skills, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and making thoughtful deployment decisions for a highly experienced, executive-facing team.
• Significant experience as a technology leader in DevSecOps, application security, information security, or related areas, ideally in roles such as Field CTO, CTO, VP of Engineering, or a comparable executive technical position.
• Demonstrated understanding of AI for software development, including how it connects to developer productivity, security, compliance, and enterprise platform strategy.
• Deep knowledge of software development practices, continuous integration and continuous deployment, cloud and platform architecture, and secure software delivery in enterprise environments.
• Executive communication skills with the ability to build credibility with senior technology and security leaders, create clear written and verbal points of view, and tailor technical strategy to different audiences.
• Experience representing a company externally through events, analyst conversations, media opportunities, and technical thought leadership content.
• Experience working autonomously in a fully remote, asynchronous environment, coordinating effectively across time zones, and partnering with stakeholders at the VP level and above.

About the team

The Field CTO organization works across customer-facing and internal teams to help GitLab meet the needs of enterprise organizations with clarity, credibility, and deep technical insight. We partner closely with sales, solutions, marketing, and product stakeholders to represent customer priorities, strengthen technical strategy in the field, and support GitLab's position in the market.

We are made up of senior technical leaders who spend much of our time in executive conversations with customers and prospects. Our work often focuses on long-term strategic outcomes rather than short sales cycles, which makes judgment, communication, and careful deployment especially important.

Success on our team comes from being able to translate complex topics into useful guidance, build trust with senior customer leaders, and help GitLab improve how we serve the market over time. In this role, you will lead experienced operators, stay close to customer reality, and help shape the future of AI-powered DevSecOps at GitLab.