Staff Product Security Architect

An overview of this role

We are hiring a Staff Product Security Architect to join our Security Platforms and Architecture organization at GitLab.

Rather than operating as a purely consultative body, Security Architecture at GitLab functions as a hands-on technical driver. Our mission is to embed proactive guidance directly into modern developer workflows and automated coding environments, embedding security standards into the software development process from the outset. We strive to enable teams to deliver secure, resilient software seamlessly while minimizing reliance on manual security gates.

In this role, you will collaborate closely with product engineering organizations, spearhead architectural strategy for critical capabilities, and serve as the primary Security Owner driving risk reduction for key entries within our risk management framework. Your daily work will span architectural design reviews, technical prototyping, and establishing scalable patterns that enable engineering teams to execute autonomously.

What you’ll do

• Partner with engineering and product leadership across GitLab, developing enough context in their domains to anticipate security problems rather than react to them
• Lead security architecture and design work for strategic initiatives, and provide direction to the cross-functional teams delivering them
• Identify, assess, and prioritise systemic security risks, and act as Security Owner for high-priority items in the Product Security Risk Register, co-executing remediation with the teams who own the code
• Codify recurring security decisions into reusable artifacts — guardrails, standards, design patterns,skills, and reference threat models — delivered into developer and AI coding tool workflows
• Build proofs of concept and prototypes to unblock engineering teams and shorten the distance between a security requirement and a working implementation
• Conduct security architecture reviews for large or strategic projects, and coordinate with Application Security so that review coverage is comprehensive and correctly prioritised
• Threat model new and existing systems, and establish the patterns that let teams threat model their own work
• Work with Security Research on proactive exploration of unknown risks in GitLab's architecture
• Anticipate emerging security challenges and propose architectural responses before they reach implementation
• Mentor security engineers across the division, and represent security architecture to engineering audiences

What you’ll bring

• Depth in application security architecture, including authentication and authorization models, privilege escalation, multi-tenant isolation, and trust boundary analysis
• Experience securing distributed systems, including service-to-service authentication, secrets handling, and the failure modes of security decisions made across process boundaries
• Working knowledge of software supply chain security: build and release integrity, artifact provenance, and dependency risk
• A track record of proactive architecture work — identifying risk before it becomes an incident, and designing something that prevents a class of problem rather than an instance of one
• Demonstrated ability to build trusted relationships with engineering leadership and influence technical direction through expertise rather than gatekeeping
• Experience defining security standards or patterns that teams adopted without being compelled to
• The ability to operate strategically while remaining hands-on, including reading unfamiliar code, building prototypes, and contributing changes
• Clear written communication, and the ability to make a security argument to an engineering audience that does not already agree with it
• A view on how security guidance should be authored and delivered for AI coding tools, not only for humans

About the team

Security Architects are a part of our Security Platforms and Architecture team, who address complex security challenges facing GitLab and its customers to enable GitLab to be the most secure software factory platform on the market. Composed of Security Architecture, Security Research, and Application Security, we focus on systemic product security risks and work cross-functionally to mitigate them while maintaining Engineering’s development velocity.

In FY27, we're implementing a new organizational model where each architect is dedicated to a specific functional area of GitLab's product, enabling deeper context, stronger relationships, and more proactive security guidance. As the Core DevOps architect, you'll be part of a team that includes architects focused on AI and the Sec Section, creating opportunities for collaboration on cross-cutting security challenges while maintaining specialized expertise in your domain.