Join Buildkite, where we help developers create faster, test smarter and innovate beyond limits.
We’re shaping the future of Scale-Out Delivery Platforms that is trusted by the worlds biggest tech companies
🌏 Remote
🏝️ Extended vacation leave
🖥️ Generous tech and home office budgets
👶🏻 Generous paid parental leave
🏢 Coworking space budget
🧘 Healthcare and wellness
At Buildkite, our mission is to unblock every developer on the planet. We’ve rethought how software delivery should work and have built a platform that is fast, reliable, secure, and scalable to meet the needs of the most demanding high-growth tech companies globally, including Shopify, Uber, Pinterest, Wayfair, Cruise, PagerDuty, Culture Amp, and Canva.
We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Pipelines team, focused on building and improving our core CI/CD platform. This team plays a critical role in how software teams ship code, solving complex infrastructure and developer experience problems at scale.
This role is ideal for an engineer with strong SRE and Ruby or Go experience, who thrives on deep problem solving and building resilient systems. You’ll contribute directly to the reliability and performance of our platform, collaborate closely with customers and peers, and help shape the future of CI/CD.
What you’ll do
🚀 Build and improve the Pipelines platform
- Design, build, and scale tools that power our CI/CD platform and are relied on by some of the best engineering teams in the world.
- Solve complex technical challenges, including data replication, system performance, and cloud infrastructure failures.
- Lead architectural decisions with a strong focus on reliability, performance and future growth.
- Own strategic initiatives end-to-end, from shaping scope with product and design to steady-state operation in production.
- Partner with customers and internal stakeholders to understand problems deeply and turn insight into practical solutions.
- Level-up our developer experience through thoughtful tooling and automation, empowering engineers across Buildkite.
⚡ Unblock and optimise
- Investigate and debug obscure performance and reliability issues across the stack.
- Explore systems at every layer, whether it’s digging into PostgreSQL internals, tuning Go/Ruby services, or designing infrastructure patterns.
- Share knowledge and drive best practices across the team through documentation, code review, and pairing.
- Support the wider engineering team with tools and infrastructure improvements that help them ship faster and more safely.
- Communicate trade-offs clearly and build consensus around technical decisions.
🪄 Lead and influence
- Influence roadmaps and priorities across teams so that our work lines up with company strategy.
- Create or evolve processes that enable autonomy, experimentation and sustainable delivery.
- Identify complex, ambiguous problems and apply structured, strategic thinking to solve them in scalable ways.
- Model inclusive behaviours that foster psychological safety, high trust and high performance.
- Mentor engineers at every level, multiplying the impact of the wider team.
🎨 Skills and experience you bring
Technical depth
- Strong hands-on experience with Go or Ruby on Rails in high-traffic production environments.
- Deep understanding of AWS, cloud infrastructure and running complex distributed systems.
- Comfortable digging into the internals of tools like PostgreSQL to understand how they function.
- A sharp nose for performance optimisation and a passion for debugging tricky, low-level issues.
Additional Experience That’s a Plus:
- Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
- Familiarity with modern CI/CD tooling and practices.
- Background in SRE, distributed systems, or systems programming (e.g., Unix/Linux internals).
- Experience building CLI tools or internal developer tooling.
Collaboration & Communication:
- Clear and thoughtful communication skills, particularly in a remote setting.
- Ability to explain complex ideas simply and foster collaboration across teams.
- A focus on empathy, pragmatism, and quality in how you build and review software.
Why Join Buildkite?
At Buildkite, we value kindness, autonomy, and collaboration. You’ll be joining a remote-first company where your work directly helps some of the world’s best engineering teams build and ship software faster and more safely. This is a chance to take on meaningful technical challenges, shape the future of our CI/CD platform, and improve the experience of thousands of developers every day.
You’ll also have access to a range of benefits designed to support you in doing your best work.
Equal Opportunity Employer
At Buildkite, we value diversity and celebrate all types of skills, backgrounds, and experiences. We’re dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment and providing reasonable accommodations throughout our recruitment process.
If you need any accommodations or support during the application or interview process, please reach out to us at [email protected].
Buildkite is a differently shaped company that values work-life balance and supports staff to work the ways that make sense for them. From the beginning, our goal has been to build a company that is people-centered, supportive and just a little bit weird 💚
