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Buildkite is a CI/CD platform trusted by leading engineering teams including Canva, Meta, Mistral AI, and NVIDIA. The company helps customers run builds, tests, and deployments with speed, reliability, and flexibility.
This is a hands-on engineering role focused on cloud cost optimization and FinOps. You'll own Buildkite's cloud efficiency picture end-to-end, tracing cost signals down to technical drivers, building predictive cost models, and shipping optimizations that reduce COGS without sacrificing reliability or customer experience.
Key responsibilities include:
**Follow the Money**: Trace AWS and Datadog cost signals to their technical root causes at customer and operation levels. Build and maintain cost models that predict margin impact when traffic patterns change. Rank optimization opportunities by expected savings, risk, effort, and cross-team dependencies.
**Ship the Fix**: Implement safe, measurable optimizations in code or configuration you own. Partner with engineering teams on larger changes, bringing evidence rather than mandates. Drive both AWS and Datadog observability efficiency—often the faster lever.
**Prove It Landed**: Establish credible baselines before changes and verify realized savings in production. Build guardrails, alerting, and cost visibility tooling to catch regressions automatically. Translate between engineering and Finance so questions get technical answers and changes get financial validation.
You'll report to the VP Engineering Platform and work closely with the CTO, Platform engineering, the Data team (who own the canonical COGS model), and Finance. The core constraint: cost cuts cannot come at the expense of reliability, throughput, or customer experience.
Ideal candidates have delivered meaningful, measured AWS savings in scaled production environments and can walk through a detailed case study. You're a working engineer who reads, writes, and ships code—not handing findings over a wall. You excel at systems diagnosis, turning ambiguous signals into precise causes. You have sound trade-off judgment, influence teams you don't manage, and stand behind your numbers with rigorous methodology.
