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Buildkite is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead Developer Experience across the company's ~80-person engineering organization. This is an internal-facing role focused on making engineers measurably faster through improvements to CI/CD pipelines, build tooling, codebase health, deployment paths, and AI-assisted development workflows.
You will own the end-to-end developer experience and lead the initiative to double R&D output per engineer over 12 months. This is hands-on work: you'll ship real PRs across unfamiliar codebases, make low-risk high-leverage changes, and stay deeply technical while influencing the entire engineering team without direct reports.
Key responsibilities include: evaluating and rolling out agentic coding tools; defining what "faster" means and building credible measurement frameworks; removing bottlenecks in CI, build systems, and deployment; and building relationships across teams to drive adoption of improvements. Your work compounds twice—optimizations you build for internal use often become features in Buildkite's product, benefiting customers worldwide.
You bring strong production software engineering experience, platform engineering background or track record leading developer tooling initiatives, and evidence of making teams measurably faster. You have exposure to meaningful scale, real fluency with agentic coding tools, and the influence skills to lead without managing. You're comfortable with ambiguity in measurement, have an intolerance for slow pace, and thrive in high-performance engineering cultures. Deep CI/CD experience, breadth across languages and stacks, and experience instrumenting developer productivity are valuable.
This is a fully remote role open to candidates in Australia, New Zealand, or US West Coast. Buildkite offers 20 days annual leave plus 10 days sick/carer's leave, 16 weeks paid parental leave, and the ability to work from anywhere for up to 6 weeks annually.
