[Hiring] Staff Engineer @Buildkite

Role Description

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead Developer Experience at Buildkite, building the compounding, AI-led development loops that lifts the productivity of all our engineers. You'll be the person leading it, looking holistically at how software gets shipped here — CI, build tooling, the codebase itself, deployment paths, and how we work with agentic coding tools; and steadily removing everything that slows us down.

Your work compounds twice. Everything you build to make our engineers faster lands inside a product that engineering teams around the world use to ship, so the change that wins our team back an hour a day doesn't stop with us — it becomes something our customers get too.

This is a fully remote role, open to candidates based in Australia, New Zealand or USA (West Coast only at this stage).

What You'll Do

• Own the end-to-end developer experience for around 80 engineers, spanning CI, build tooling, codebase health, deployment paths, and the AI-assisted development loop.
• Lead our goal of doubling R&D output per engineer, which includes working out what "faster" genuinely means and finding measures that hold up.
• Stay hands-on and ship the work yourself, landing real PRs across languages and services you may never have touched before.
• Bring the whole engineering team with you by building credibility and relationships that allow people to genuinely buy into your ideas.
• Push the frontier on agentic coding tooling, evaluating it, rolling it out, measuring whether it's actually working.

Qualifications

• A strong software engineering background with real production experience — you're an engineer first, and you're still writing the code.
• Experience inside a platform engineering organisation, or a track record as the person on an engineering team who led the charge on AI and developer tooling.
• Evidence that you've made engineering teams measurably faster, along with a clear point of view on what worked, what didn't, and why.
• Exposure to meaningful scale, so you've seen the problems that only appear once systems and teams get big.
• Real fluency with agentic coding tools, and a good instinct for when to trust them, correct them, or override them entirely.
• The influence skills to lead everyone and manage no one, which means strong relationships, fast buy-in, and the judgement to ask "is this a terrible idea?" of the right people before you ship.
• An absolute intolerance for going slowly, paired with a high tolerance for trying new things and taking sensible risks.
• Comfort with ambiguity around measurement, so you can build a compelling case from imperfect signals without gaming them.

Requirements

• Deep CI/CD experience, particularly untangling and speeding up slow pipelines.
• Time in a high-performance engineering environment where pace was a genuine cultural norm rather than an aspiration.
• Breadth across languages and stacks rather than depth in any single one.
• Experience instrumenting and reporting on developer productivity.

Benefits

• Work from anywhere in the world for up to 6 weeks a year, on top of a fully remote setup.
• 20 days paid annual leave plus 10 days sick & carer's leave — actively encouraged.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave for primary carers (6 for secondary).
• A remote-work allowance for home-office kit, co-working, or working elsewhere.
• Confidential EAP & mental health support.
• Support for learning and growth with time and budget for conferences, courses, and coaching.
• Retirement and health coverage (based on your region).

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].