Customer Success Architect, Japan

An overview of this role

As a Customer Success Architect, you'll serve as a trusted strategic advisor and technical authority to some of GitLab's most complex and high-value Enterprise and Government customers across Japan. In this role, you will be driving and shaping how our largest customers adopt GitLab's intelligent DevSecOps platform to achieve their business goals and realise meaningful, long-term outcomes. You will be working closely with customers after the sale to turn pre-sales command plans into clear success plans, guide them through their customer journey, and drive adoption, utilization, and technical maturity. You will also be directly influencing renewal and expansion decisions through your post-sales engagements with executive-level decision makers in the account.

This is a individual-contributor role for someone who has already led pre or post sales customer engagements in large complex accounts across multiple industry domains to drive quantifiable business outcomes..The individual is comfortable operating with  ambiguity, and can credibly advise VP- and C-level stakeholders on business transformation, application modernization, platform strategy, architecture, and organizational DevSecOps transformation. You'll also be shaping playbooks and best practices, and acting as an escalation point for the team's most technically or politically complex situations.

Reporting into the APJ Customer Success organization, you'll own a portfolio of GitLab's most strategic enterprise and Government accounts, act as the executive-level technical liaison for these accounts, and drive cross-functional resolution of their highest-priority issues — coordinating and, where needed, directing the efforts of Product Management, Engineering, Sales, Professional Services, and Support. You'll bring deep technical expertise in CI/CD, cloud platforms, multi-cloud, hybrid architecture and enterprise DevSecOps practices.You will use that expertise to shape customers' long-term platform strategy, apply best practices, configure GitLab for their environments and stay current with platform capabilities. In your first year, success will look like establishing yourself as the trusted senior advisor across a portfolio of flagship accounts, building strong relationships with key stakeholders, materially improving and increasing platform maturity, leading retention and renewal conversations, increasing customer satisfaction across your portfolio and contributing to the broader CSA team's technical standards and ways of working.

Some examples of our projects:

• Turning pre-sales command plans into measurable customer success plans that align technical adoption with business outcomes
• Leading and driving the technical strategy behind a large-scale DevSecOps platform consolidation for a regulated Enterprise account or Government, including guiding enterprise customers on GitLab best practices across CI/CD, DevSecOps, cloud architecture, TCO, applying compliance and architecture as well as business case presentations to customer executives
• Owning end-to-end resolution of a critical, multi-team escalation for a flagship account — driving root cause analysis, coordinating Engineering/Product/Support, and personally briefing customer executives on remediation

What you’ll do

• Owns a book of Enterprise and Government customers and drive adoption, retention, expansion, and overall satisfaction through ongoing strategic, business and technical engagement.
• Serves as the senior post-sales strategic, business and technical advisor for a portfolio of GitLab's most complex, highest-value enterprise and Government accounts, shaping multi-year platform and DevSecOps strategy in partnership with customer executives, coordinating responses to questions, issues, and escalations across Support, Product Management, Sales, and Professional Services.  
• Translates ambiguous, high-stakes business outcomes into rigorous Customer Success Plans that are regularly reviewed with customer stakeholders. The Customer Success Plans contain clearly defined business outcome related goals, quantifiable benefits, realistic adoption milestones and remediation actions. 
• Prepares executive-ready reporting conducted on a regular basis with clear accountability for outcomes that demonstrate impact on adoption, retention, and expansion of GitLab products and services.
• Provides deep technical guidance on enterprise-scale CI/CD architecture, DevSecOps maturity models, platform consolidation strategy, including advising on complex trade-offs (e.g., multi-cloud vs. hybrid, self-managed vs. GitLab Dedicated, etc).
• Owns the full lifecycle of your account portfolio's adoption, retention, and expansion outcomes, with direct accountability for the commercial and technical health of flagship relationships.
• Leads end-to-end resolution of critical, cross-functional account escalations, ensuring root causes are identified, follow-up actions are owned, holding internal teams accountable to timelines, driving the root cause analysis and personally managing executive communication and risk. 
• Leads end-to-end resolution of critical, cross-functional account escalations, ensuring   root causes are identified, follow-up actions are owned, holding internal teams accountable to timelines, driving the driving root cause analysis and personally managing executive communication and risk.
• Designs and delivers technical enablement programs at scale, identifying systemic maturity gaps across a portfolio and building the roadmap (not just individual sessions) that closes them.
• Advises key customers stakeholders on cloud and platform architecture decisions with enterprise-wide impact, which includes  multi-region deployment strategy, secrets management architecture and network/security topology for regulated environments.
• Guides customers on GitLab platform best practices including Git workflows, branching strategies, CI/CD pipeline design, DevSecOps adoption patterns, and security scanning configuration. 
• Provides hands-on technical enablement and onboarding, including education on GitLab features, releases, and use cases, and identification of training and maturity opportunities aligned to customer goals. 
• Engages customers on cloud platform architecture decisions relevant to their GitLab deployment — including self-managed vs. GitLab Dedicated, Runner configuration and auto-scaling, secrets management, and network topology considerations. 
• Advises customers on DevSecOps consolidation value — articulating the TCO, compliance, and developer experience case for platform consolidation over fragmented toolchains. 
• Collaborates with Professional Services, Sales, and internal teams to identify expansion opportunities, recommend enablement interventions, and ensure a seamless customer journey from onboarding through renewal. 

What you’ll bring

• Must be a Japanese citizen based in Japan
• Mandatory Japanese (native or professional level) and English language proficiency
• Hands-on experience building or owning CI/CD pipelines end to end, including pipeline as code, multi-stage design, artifact management, and troubleshooting in real-world environments.
• A career built across different direct customer facing engagement roles such as Technical Account Management, Technical Solution Sales, Pre-sales, Business Development, Consulting, Professional services across customers in different industry vertical domains like Government, Banking, Financial and Insurance Services, Manufacturing, Telecommunications, engagement with multiple technology and platform transition experience such as from on-premise deployments to Cloud, application modernization experience from monolith to microservices, from Waterfall to DevOps to DevSecOps and others to provide the depth and breadth of experience to advise customers on transformations and deployments that you've already seen play out elsewhere across your multiple customer engagements. 
• A long-standing demonstrated track record as the person other senior people call when an account is in genuine crisis or gained across a sustained career of Enterprise or Government account ownership
• Credible judgment earned by personally owning the outcomes of dozens of complex enterprise customer account engagements over the course of a career, including situations with real commercial, technical, and reputational stakes
• A consistent track record of being trusted by customer executives and internal leadership to operate with minimal oversight in ambiguous and high-pressure situations 
• Deep, hands-on expertise in DevSecOps practices, including shift-left security and integrating SAST, DAST, SCA, and container scanning into development workflows as well as architecting and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines at enterprise scale
• Expert-level understanding of Git, merge request workflows and delivery lifecycles, having personally guided organizations through branching strategies such as trunk-based development and GitFlow, and modern software delivery lifecycles.
• Demonstrated experience with infrastructure as code, GitOps, Cloud and on-premises environments with relevant experience that support GitLab deployments, including networking, identity and access management (IAM), secrets management, and deployment considerations for regulated or high-security environments
• Demonstrated experience partnering with customers to turn business requirements into actionable success plans, with measurable goals and verifiable business outcomes that are suitable for executive-level quarterly reporting.
• Demonstrated ability to drive product adoption, dive deep into the accounts assigned and scale out the level of influence in the account.
• Demonstrated ability to build and defend executive-level business cases (TCO, compliance, risk) that influence budget and platform strategy decisions
• Demonstrated ability to operate with autonomy in ambiguous, high-stakes situations with strong communication, stakeholder management, and organizational experience  to manage a portfolio of enterprise and Government customers, balance multiple priorities, guide escalations, and coordinate effectively across customer teams and internal cross functional teams to resolve issues appropriately and in a timely manner.

About the team

The Customer Success Architect team is part of GitLab's Customer Experience organization. It supports strategic enterprise and Government accounts across the APJ region through hands-on technical guidance, consultative partnership, and practical problem solving.

We act as a reliable technical advisor and an important link between customers and the broader GitLab ecosystem. We bring platform, cloud, and DevSecOps depth to customer engagements and work closely with Product Management, Engineering, Sales, Support, and Professional Services to address questions, guide customers through technical choices, navigate escalations, and help them realize measurable value from GitLab.

Composed of team members working remotely across time zones, we operate asynchronously to support a focused set of strategic accounts across the region. It's a team well suited for people who enjoy solving complex customer challenges, building long-term partnerships, and helping enterprise organizations grow their maturity with GitLab in practical, measurable ways.