The fastest CI for AI workflows at scale nothing else survives. Leading software teams across industries have standardized on Buildkite for CI and orchestration. Backed by General Catalyst.
About the role
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.
What they're looking for
- 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
More about this role
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.
We have a plan to double R&D output per engineer over the next 12 months across a team of around 80 engineers, and this is the role we've created to make that happen. 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.
Here 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. Very few developer experience roles let you fix a problem once and have it show up in the industry.
And if you'd rather fix the pipeline than give the conference talk about it, this is the right seat. This is internal work: the systems our own engineers live in every day, not developer advocacy or external DevEx. Your...
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