What we do in the next twelve months will define Buildkite's future — and in this role, you'll be in the front seat to make it happen.
AI has changed how software gets built — our customers are running more agents, more builds, more concurrency than ever. Workloads doubled in the last three months on an already large base, and customers are asking us to support 5–10x growth this year. Put plainly: right now they're scaling faster than we can keep up, and closing that gap is the job. It's the most epic pace of software engineering most people will ever see.
We're looking for someone with founder energy to lead the teams building it.
Buildkite runs continuously. It can't be paused, and partial failure is a normal operating condition. The systems carry stateful guarantees for the companies pushing the most code on the planet — Uber, OpenAI, Shopify, Airbnb, Canva, Pinterest, and most of the frontier AI labs. Migrations, rollouts, reversibility, live operations: real engineering problems with real consequences.
Most of our competitors weren't architected for this moment — hybrid, massive concurrency, AI-scale workloads. We were, and customers feel the difference in every build.
You'd lead five product teams, each at a different stage of maturity. Working with your EMs and the wider leadership group, you'll set the trade-offs across the portfolio and translate the vision into something each team can run with. AI agents will soon be a big share of what's pushing code through Buildkite; part of the fun is working out together how to help those agents live their best lives.
Reporting to our CTO and co-founder, you'll be accountable for the pace, quality, and impact of everything these teams ship — and for growing the managers and technical leaders who run them.
That means holding a high bar for delivery and technical decision-making across all five teams; coaching your EMs and growing Staff and Principal engineers into broader influence; partnering with product leadership to turn strategy into reality and work through the hard trade-offs together; and helping the whole team get closer to its customers. You'll also be engineering's voice to the executive team, the board when it warrants it, and enterprise customers on the calls that matter.
You'll have real decision-making authority over delivery, team structure, and technical direction — with a co-founder alongside you — and you'll be measured on what ships, what customers adopt, and the strength of the bench you build, not activity.
You care about building a high-performance engineering culture, but you have genuine taste in technical decision-making — you can tell the difference between a team that's busy and one that's shipping. You empower people to move fast, then hold them to account for what they build. You bring product thinking into engineering management, and you're wired for high velocity.
You lead like a founder: you'll dig into a problem you don't understand and use it to inform strategy. You have a track record of outsized results from small teams — managing managers, developing staff-level ICs, and owning delivery across multiple product lines at once.
The one place we won't budge: you've led product engineering through real scaling and owned the outcome alongside your teams — not advised on it from a distance.
You're a strong fit if you:
- lead with product instinct and technical taste, not just process
- get energy from intensity and ambiguity, and turn "I don't understand this yet" into strategy
- want real decision rights and are happy to be held to what ships
- can read the code, challenge an architectural call on merit, and earn trust from senior engineers (our stack: Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, Go, and PostgreSQL at scale)
Probably not the right role if you:
- prefer a mature org with the scaffolding already in place
- like a clean line between setting strategy and owning delivery
- measure teams by how busy they look rather than what they ship
- want the pace to settle down this year — it won't
We're saying this plainly so you can decide for yourself, not to gatekeep. The pace here is real, and it filters as much as it attracts.
- Scale that's already real. Over a billion daily users and the customer list above — the bar for "scale" is set externally, not on a slide.
- Real decision rights. You report to a co-founder who's in it with you, and you own delivery, team structure, and technical direction.
- Frontier work. CI/CD is becoming the bottleneck of the AI era, and Buildkite is built for that moment.
- Remote, properly. We've worked this way since 2013 — deep focus, with genuine overlap across our AU/NZ and US-Pacific teams.
- Small enough that it counts. Around 150 people, ~75% from an engineering background. What you build is visible — and you can bring the weird while you do it.
Our engineering teams work across AU/NZ and US Pacific time zones — a conscious decision that lets us move quickly and minimise fully async work. So whilst Buildkite is a fully remote company, this doesn't mean we hire in every location. If you're applying from outside these regions, we aren't in a position to hire you, and we can't currently offer sponsorship.
Every application gets a response — that's how we run our process, not a line. If you'd like a conversation before applying, reach out to Simon McSorley directly at [email protected]. Otherwise, hit apply. We're wired for velocity — you won't be waiting long.
