Senior Solutions Architect - Japan

An overview of this role

As a Senior Solutions Architect, you'll be a trusted advisor to GitLab customers and prospects in Japan. You'll explain how GitLab's artificial intelligence-powered development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) platform addresses customers' business priorities and technical requirements, helping technical leaders and executives evaluate its value.

You'll translate technology into business value and help customers make informed adoption decisions. The initial sale isn't the end of the relationship: you'll support continued adoption, new use cases, and expansion into additional products and editions, helping increase GitLab consumption through greater customer value.

What you’ll do

• Lead structured discovery to understand customer business priorities, development processes, challenges, stakeholders, and success criteria. Connect proposed solutions to business value and return on investment.
• Collaborate with Account Executives on account strategies and customer action plans that move opportunities from technical evaluation to contract.
• Lead demos, workshops, proofs of concept or value, architecture design, and technical validation, including Linux-based, self-managed, and air-gapped customer environments.
• Design roadmaps for DevSecOps and artificial intelligence-enabled development across the software development lifecycle. Address processes, roles, governance, and developer experience. Plan the effort and timelines for migrating continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines from Jenkins to GitLab.
• Resolve post-sale adoption challenges with post-sales teams and partners, and identify expansion opportunities across use cases, business units, workloads, products, and editions.
• Build relationships with developers and business and technical leaders. Explain GitLab's competitive differentiation and address objections about existing tools, overlapping artificial intelligence capabilities, cost, and migration effort.
• Create reusable proposals, architecture diagrams, proof-of-value plans, executive materials, technical content, and success stories. Present at webinars and marketing events to support pipeline development.
• Share customer feedback and competitive insights with Product Management, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing. Test GitLab, artificial intelligence, DevSecOps, and cloud technologies hands-on, and mentor team members to share best practices.

What you’ll bring

• Experience in technical pre-sales, solutions architecture, consulting, technical sales, or a similar customer-facing role, using structured discovery, value selling, stakeholder mapping, and consensus building.
• Practical understanding of the software development lifecycle, DevSecOps, security, and cloud technologies, with experience using GitLab or comparable source control, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and developer collaboration platforms.
• Experience leading demos, workshops, proofs of concept or value, technical proposals, or solution architecture design, and the ability to discuss deployment, security, and operations with customer technical teams.
• The ability to explain technical trade-offs and business value to developers, technical leaders, and executives, and collaborate with Account Executives on opportunity strategy, adoption, and expansion.
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation and Model Context Protocol, and the ability to discuss their use in artificial intelligence-enabled development.
• The ability to mentor team members, share reusable knowledge, and give and receive feedback with empathy and respect for others' expertise.
• Fluency in Japanese and professional working proficiency in English.
• Helpful but not required: a background in software development, systems integration, or project or product management. Other useful experience includes developer productivity, cloud-native technologies, enterprise platform governance and rollout, post-sales recommendations, consumption-based models, or creating reusable technical content.

About the team

The Solutions Architect team is part of GitLab's Sales organization. We work with Sales, Product Management, Engineering, Marketing, post-sales teams, and partners across regions, collaborating asynchronously to share reusable knowledge and best practices. We learn through hands-on testing and iteration, guided by GitLab's values of collaboration, customer results, efficiency, diversity, inclusion and belonging, iteration, and transparency.