Engineering Manager - Platform

At Buildkite, our mission is to unblock every developer on the planet. We’ve rethought how software delivery should work and have built a platform that is fast, reliable, secure, and scalable to meet the needs of the most demanding high-growth tech companies globally, including Shopify, Uber, Pinterest, Wayfair, Cruise, PagerDuty, Culture Amp, and Canva.

We’re hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Platform team at a pivotal moment. Workloads on the platform have doubled in the last three months on an already large base, and customers are asking us to support 5-10x growth this year. This is the team that’s responsible for scaling the runtime infrastructure, driving our transition to Kubernetes, and owning the build, deploy, and observability tooling and practice that the rest of engineering relies on.

This role is ideal for a technical leader who thrives on enabling engineers to deliver impactful results. We'll be tasking you to manage and support your team, collaborate with stakeholders, and ensure the Platform team moves quickly while continuing to provide reliable and scalable infrastructure.

You will be a vital part of Buildkite’s leadership team, driving our next phase of growth, scalability, and customer impact. This is a unique opportunity to lead by example, shape direction, and champion engineering excellence—making a meaningful, global impact on how developers build and deliver software.

What You’ll Do:

🚀 Lead and Support the Platform Team:

• Build and foster a team culture centred on collaboration, innovation, and psychological safety.
• Work closely with the team to develop and collectively own a roadmap based on the energy, excitement, and interests of the team, including your own
• Collaborate with your peers in engineering management to socialise the teams wins, priorities, and additional support needed in various efforts, as well as incorporating those same asks from others into the teams shared roadmap 
• Hold regular 1:1s with team members to understand their motivations and help them grow their careers.
• Work with the team to continuously iterate on team dynamics, development processes, and delivery cycles - optimising for high performance and professional enjoyment.
• And of course, hack away anywhere you think will help, if that’s your jam! 

⚡ Enable the Team to Deliver:

• Facilitate the delivery of projects that’ll let us blow past our growth targets, make us best in class for reliability, and keep the security of our infrastructure top notch.
• Participate in technical discussions, review code changes, and provide feedback on technical plans.
• Managing key vendor relationships by evaluating usage and plans and making recommendations.
• Evaluating and communicating tradeoffs, prioritising, listening, unblocking others, making final decisions, and having fun.
• Use effective and efficient written communication to ensure alignment and collaboration in our fully remote environment.

🎨 Skills and Experience You Bring:

• Leadership: Proven experience managing and mentoring engineering teams, with a focus on collaboration and delivery.
• Technical Expertise: Strong background in Platform/SRE-related work, including maintaining large-scale applications and ensuring reliability and adaptability. Familiarity with Terraform, AWS containerised environments. Kubernetes, Ruby and Rails, Postgres and Kafka is a plus
• Problem Solving: A proactive approach to identifying and addressing technical challenges and improving workflows.
• CI/CD Knowledge: Experience with deployment safety practices and patterns, such as smoke tests, canaries, and blue/green deploys.
• Communication Skills: Strong ability to foster trust and alignment within a remote-first team through clear and empathetic communication.
• Operational Expertise: Experience managing infrastructure upgrades, maintaining compliance (SOC2 knowledge is a bonus), and coordinating on-call structures.
• Customer Understanding: A strong ability to engage with stakeholders to understand and deliver on customer needs.

Why Join Buildkite?

At Buildkite, we value kindness, autonomy, and collaboration. You’ll be part of a remote-first company where your leadership can make a meaningful impact—empowering developers worldwide to build and deliver better software faster.

• Be a key contributor to scaling our infrastructure and improving developer experiences.
• Access incredible benefits designed to support you in achieving outstanding results.