About the Job
Buildkite’s CI platform is trusted by the world’s leading engineering teams, shipping software to over 1,000,000,000 daily users.
We're looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Releases team. In this role, you'll help solve some of the most challenging technical problems we face as we continue to scale Buildkite's platform. You'll drive architectural decisions, lead technical strategy, and work closely with engineers, designers, and product ma...
Staff Engineers at Buildkite are hands-on technical leaders. You'll influence how we design, build, and scale systems while supporting other engineers to deliver their best work.
Key Responsibilities
Design the release architecture and core data model, including the canonical release entity and its relationships across services, environments, artefacts, and actors
Lead key technical decisions around security, reliability, and scale — particularly for the immutable evidence trail and policy gate infrastructure
Drive the hardest cross-system integrations, including ingestion from Pipelines and GitHub Deployments
Ensure the platform is extensible enough to support progressive delivery capabilities (canary analysis, staged rollouts, health-based promotion, automatic rollback) without requiring customers to replace existing CD tooling
Design, build, and scale tools and systems relied on by some of the best engineering teams in the world
Solve complex technical challenges around performance, reliability, and scalability
Work closely with customers and stakeholders to deeply understand their release and governance challenges, and deliver practical, high-impact solutions
Drive improvements to developer experience through better tooling, automation, and processes
Investigate and resolve complex performance and reliability issues across the stack
Explore systems at every layer — from infrastructure patterns to backend services and data stores
Share knowledge and drive engineering best practices across teams through documentation, mentorship, and pairing
Support the wider engineering organisation by contributing to cross-team tooling, infrastructure, and frameworks
Communicate trade-offs effectively and build alignment around technical decisions
Required Skills & Abilities
Proven experience working in production environments at scale, ideally using Go, Ruby on Rails, or similar languages
Experience designing event-driven or audit-log systems — immutable records, event sourcing, or append-only data models are a strong plus
Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure and deploying complex, containerised applications (AWS experience preferred)
Familiarity with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, including reasoning about performance and replication
Comfortable solving challenges in distributed systems, observability, and infrastructure reliability
Familiarity with CD systems, deployment pipelines, or release orchestration platforms (e.g. Spinnaker, Argo Rollouts, Flux, or similar)
Understanding of progressive delivery patterns: canary deployments, blue/green, feature flags, health-based promotion, and rollback strategies
Experience with DORA metrics, release governance, or compliance/audit requirements in regulated or large-scale engineering environments
Background in integrating with source control and CI/CD platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Buildkite, etc.)
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in a remote-first environment
Ability to distil complex technical concepts into clear explanations for diverse audiences
A collaborative, pragmatic mindset — balancing technical quality with business context
Comfortable mentoring engineers and leading technical discussions across teams
Kubernetes, Terraform, or other infrastructure-as-code tools
Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or other streaming/event-driven systems
Background in SRE, systems programming, or Linux/Unix internals
Understanding of secure system design and cloud security best practices
