Principal Engineer - Data

For twenty years, "using the data" meant a person opening a dashboard and clicking until the number showed up.

That's ending. The thing asking the question now is often an agent — a salesperson's AI fetching its own answer, a developer's agent interrogating build history from inside the product. The dashboard was the interface built for humans. What comes next has to work for machines and humans at once, and almost no one ha...

Buildkite's data goes deep — the build and test history behind how teams like Airbnb, OpenAI, Canva, Anthropic and Pinterest ship software. Storing it was never the hard part. The hard part is the question underneath everything now: can an agent find it, trust it, and act on it — safely, and fast enough to matter?

You'd be a strong fit if you:
Want to own the data architecture direction outright — set the patterns rather than inherit them.
Get energy from an open problem with no template to copy, and are happy making the call when the answer isn't obvious.
Want to be the definitive technical voice on data and influence through evidence, not a management title.
Do your best work async and remote, with a lot of autonomy and not much looking over your shoulder.

Probably not the right role if you:
Want a people-leadership path — this is a pure architecture role, for the immediate future.
Prefer a mature data org with settled patterns and plenty of scaffolding to lean on.
Want the direction handed to you. Here you set it, which means ambiguity and decisions that are yours to own.

None of that is a filter for its own sake — we'd rather you weigh it up now than find the mismatch three months in.
Frontier work. Agentic data isn't a roadmap slide here — it's the problem in front of you, at the edge of where data platforms are heading.
Real scale, real stakes. The data you'd shape sits in the critical path of some of the strongest engineering teams on the planet, shipping to over a billion daily users.
Ownership, not tickets. Flat, high-autonomy. Being the most senior data person here is influence you don't get where the function's buried three layers deep. Plainly: less scaffolding, and the direction is yours — which cuts both ways.
Remote, properly. Since 2013 — async, built for deep focus, with genuine team overlap.
Small enough that it counts. ~150 people, no hiding. What you build is visible. Bring the weird while you're at it — we hire the whole human, not the role.

Every application gets a response. If this is the problem you've been wanting to get your hands on, apply, or reach out with questions first.
 
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