Alhaji Bello Kagarawal was walking out of the mosque after dark on Friday when the gunmen sprang their attack, Gombe police spokesman Ahmed Gidaye Mohammed said.
He added that there was no known motive for the attack.
Islamist group Boko Haram has been waging a low level insurgency against Nigeria's government since 2009, and has been blamed for hundreds of killings in gun and bomb attacks.
A movement styled on the Taliban, the sect says it wants to transform Nigeria, a country of 160 million people split evenly between Muslims and Christians, into an Islamic state.
Attacks usually target security forces, but authority figures, including traditional Islamic leaders seen by the group as not sufficiently pious, are also frequently struck.
"The suspected Boko Haram sect members came and asked for the traditional ruler who was about entering the mosque to say his prayers," said eyewitness Abubakar Abdulsalaw.
"When Alhaji heard them he turned and answered them and they pulled out their rifle and shot him several times at close range. He slumped down and died."
A Briton and an Italian held hostage in Nigeria were killed by their captors on Thursday, after being held for almost a year by what security officials said was a Boko Haram faction, although a spokesman for the sect denied any involvement on Friday.
Boko Haram used to be confined to Nigeria's northeastern state of Borno, but the sect, or several factions of it, have spread out in the past six months to plague at least 10 states across the north, and have struck the capital a few times.
A gun battle broke out on Friday between suspected Islamist militants and police in Nigeria's biggest northern city of Kano, after gunmen opened fire on a police station.
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