Buildkite's CI platform is trusted by the world's leading engineering teams, shipping software to over 1,000,000,000 daily users.Job OverviewWe'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 managers to deliver impactful improvements.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.About the TeamThe Releases team is building Buildkite's release control plane — a foundational layer that gives platform teams one trusted, auditable view of what shipped, where, and whether it met governance requirements.Our initial focus is designing a canonical release model (service, environment, commit, artefact, actor, status), reliable ingestion from Pipelines and GitHub Deployments, and an immutable evidence trail that powers policy gates and DORA metrics.Beyond that foundation, the same platform becomes a progressive delivery product: staged rollouts, canary analysis, blue/green deploys, health-based promotion, and automatic rollback.
In short, we're moving from observing and governing releases to orchestrating and optimising them — integrating cleanly with existing CD systems rather than forcing a full replacement.What You'll DoOwn Technical Direction for the Releases PlatformDesign the release architecture and core data model, including the canonical release entity and its relationships across services, environments, artefacts, and actorsLead key technical decisions around security, reliability, and scale — particularly for the immutable evidence trail and policy gate infrastructureDrive the hardest cross-system integrations, including ingestion from Pipelines and GitHub DeploymentsEnsure 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 toolingBuild and Improve the Releases PlatformDesign, build, and scale tools and systems relied on by some of the best engineering teams in the worldSolve complex technical challenges around performance, reliability,



and scalabilityWork closely with customers and stakeholders to deeply understand their release and governance challenges, and deliver practical, high-impact solutionsDrive improvements to developer experience through better tooling, automation, and processesLead and UnblockInvestigate and resolve complex performance and reliability issues across the stackExplore systems at every layer — from infrastructure patterns to backend services and data storesShare knowledge and drive engineering best practices across teams through documentation, mentorship, and pairingSupport the wider engineering organisation by contributing to cross-team tooling, infrastructure, and frameworksCommunicate trade-offs effectively and build alignment around technical decisionsSkills & Experience We ValueTechnical ExpertiseProven experience working in production environments at scale, ideally using Go, Ruby on Rails, or similar languagesExperience designing event-driven or audit-log systems — immutable records, event sourcing, or append-only data models are a solid plusDeep understanding of cloud infrastructure and deploying complex, containerised applications (AWS experience preferred)Familiarity with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, including reasoning about performance and replicationComfortable solving challenges in distributed systems, observability, and infrastructure reliabilityDeployment & Release Experience Essential To This RoleHands‐on experience building or operating deployment and release‐orchestration platforms — designing the workflows that carry a change from merge to production safely, and the systems that model and track those deploymentsFamiliarity with CD systems and deployment tooling (e.g. Argo CD / Argo Rollouts, Spinnaker, Flux, or similar), and with the workflow‐orchestration engines that coordinate complex, multi‐step deploys (e.g. Temporal or comparable)Deep understanding of progressive delivery: canary deployments and canary analysis, blue/green, staged and phased rollouts, feature flags (e.g. LaunchDarkly), health‐based promotion, and automated rollbackExperience designing unified,



self‐service deployment workflows relied on across many teams or business units — reducing the toil of shipping while keeping guardrails and governance in placeExperience with DORA metrics, release governance, or compliance/audit requirements in regulated or large‐scale engineering environmentsBackground integrating with source control and CI/CD platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Buildkite, etc.)Collaboration and CommunicationExcellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in a remote‐first environmentAbility to distil complex technical concepts into clear explanations for diverse audiencesA collaborative, pragmatic mindset — balancing technical quality with business contextComfortable mentoring engineers and leading technical discussions across teamsAdditional ExperienceKubernetes, Terraform, or other infrastructure‐as‐code toolsFamiliarity with Kafka, Flink, or other streaming/event‐driven systemsBackground in SRE, systems programming, or Linux/Unix internalsUnderstanding of secure system design and cloud security best practicesWhy Join BuildkiteAt Buildkite, we value kindness, autonomy, and collaboration.
You'll be joining a remote‐first company where your work directly helps some of the world's best engineering teams build and ship software faster and safer.Competitive compensation, including salary, equity, and benefits packageFlexible, remote‐first culture (Remote in the ANZ & PST Regions)Meaningful technical challenges at scaleOpportunities for professional growth, technical leadership, and cross‐team influenceA collaborative, inclusive, and innovative culture where your ideas make a real impactWhere you can workOur 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.Equal Opportunity EmployerAt Buildkite, we value diversity and celebrate all types of skills, backgrounds, and experiences.
We're dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment and providing reasonable accommodations throughout our recruitment process.If you need any accommodations or support during the application or interview process, please reach out to us at .
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📌 Staff Engineer - Releases (Victoria)
🏢 Buildkite
📍 Victoria