Vice President, Legal Commercial

What You’ll Do

• Define and execute the long-term strategy for GitLab's global commercial legal function, aligning legal priorities with company-wide revenue growth, market expansion, and product evolution.
• Serve as the primary legal executive partner to the CRO, CFO, and GTM leadership, advising on commercial strategy, enterprise deal structures, pricing and packaging risk, and AI-related contracting at the highest levels of complexity and materiality.
• Build, lead, and develop a world-class team of commercial attorneys, contract managers, and legal ops professionals across multiple regions, fostering a high-performance, async-first culture with managers as direct reports organized by geography and subject matter expertise.
• Set enterprise-wide standards for commercial contracting, including risk tiering, escalation frameworks, template governance, and playbook strategy that scale consistently across regions and deal types.
• Benchmark AI-specific contractual terms across the enterprise SaaS market to ensure GitLab's standard positions reflect current market practice; lead GitLab's negotiating posture on AI deal issues, including data usage, model training, output ownership, liability allocation, and transparency obligations.
• Work in sync with the CLO Chief of Staff on the continuous improvement and optimization of GitLab's CLM system with full integration across the Quote-to-Cash process, and champion AI tools and legal operations capabilities to drive contracting efficiency, pipeline visibility, and data-driven decision-making.
• Lead GitLab's most significant strategic partnerships, including hyperscaler relationships, structuring and negotiating complex co-sell, reseller, and marketplace agreements in coordination with GitLab Ecosystems and Strategy Teams.
• Oversee AI governance contracting across customer, partner, and supplier agreements, and translate evolving global AI regulations, including the EU AI Act and emerging U.S. frameworks, into practical contracting positions and contribute to policy guidance in concert with the Sr. Dir Public Policy.
• Lead legal support for GitLab's facility clearance requirements and public sector commercial contracting, including federal and SLED agreements, FAR/DFARS compliance, and government contract vehicle requirements.
• Lead the procurement legal function covering global vendor contracting, inbound SaaS, professional services, and infrastructure agreements, partnering with Finance, Security, and Privacy on vendor risk frameworks.
• Serve as a senior voice on cross-functional initiatives involving Legal, Finance, Product, Revenue Operations, and Procurement, influencing decisions that shape how GitLab goes to market globally.

What You’ll Bring

• 15+ years of combined law firm and in-house experience, with substantial tenure in a senior commercial legal leadership role at a global SaaS or enterprise technology company.
• J.D. or U.S. law degree equivalent with bar admission in good standing in at least one U.S. state.
• 5+ years leading and scaling teams of attorneys and contract managers, with a track record of developing legal talent and building high-functioning commercial legal organizations with managers as direct reports.
• Hands-on experience owning or leading a CLM implementation or expansion, with working knowledge of Quote-to-Cash process integration across Sales, Finance, and Revenue Operations.
• Demonstrated fluency in AI governance and product legal issues, including drafting or negotiating AI-specific contractual terms and advising on AI regulatory requirements; proven track record deploying AI-powered legal workflows at the team level, not just awareness of the tools.
• Deep expertise in enterprise SaaS contracting, strategic partnerships, data privacy, and complex partner, channel, and public sector agreements, including familiarity with FedRAMP, FAR/DFARS, or equivalent frameworks.
• Visionary but execution-oriented: someone who operates effectively at the strategy level without losing sight of the operational details that make a legal function run.
• A genuine champion for AI-enabled legal work, with hands-on experience driving adoption of tools and workflows that make teams faster and smarter.
• Exceptional executive presence and communication skills, with a proven ability to influence at the C-suite level and represent legal as a business growth partner.
• Demonstrated ability to lead geographically distributed teams in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.