Incident Management & Resilience Lead

Incidents get resolved, but the fixes that would stop them recurring slip down the backlog — and a few weeks later, a version of the same failure comes back. Most teams live with that. On a platform as critical as Buildkite's, we've decided not to, which is why we're creating a role whose whole remit is to own how w...

Buildkite runs production builds for teams like OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber, Shopify, Airbnb, Canva and Pinterest — software delivery in the critical path for over a billion daily users. When something breaks here, it breaks loudly, for people who can't afford it to.

Until now, Incident response has been carried by whoever was closest, in the gaps between everything else they own. It's held up. But "held up" is no longer the bar for a platform this critical. We'll be asking you to set the standard for how the whole engineering org detects, responds to, learns from, and designs o...

Would rather draw the map on a blank page than inherit someone else's
Get more out of the incident that never happened than the heroic save
Can hold a standard across teams you don't manage, and keep the relationship
Read "flat, high-autonomy, little scaffolding" as room to move, not risk
Want a mature incident function to run, not one to build from the ground up
Would rather chair the call than open the code and dashboards yourself
Need top-down authority before people will move for you
Find cross-team persuasion draining rather than part of the fun
First of its kind here. No one has owned this before you. You define what incident management at Buildkite means — the mandate is real and yours to shape.
Scale that's genuinely rare. Billions of builds, in the critical path for some of the strongest engineering teams on the planet — systems that run continuously and can't be casually restarted.
Ownership, not tickets. Flat structure, high autonomy. You're trusted to make the calls that matter and own the result.
Remote, properly. We've worked this way since 2013 — async and built for deep focus, with genuine overlap across our ANZ and US-Pacific teams.
Small enough that it counts. ~150 people. What you change is visible across the org.

Our engineering teams are based across ANZ and US-Pacific time zones — a conscious decision that lets us move quickly with real overlap and minimise fully async work. So while Buildkite is fully remote, we don't hire everywhere: if you're applying from outside these regions, we're not currently in a position to hire you, and can't offer sponsorship.
Every application gets a response. We're wired for velocity, so you won't be left waiting on us. 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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