---
title: 'Senior Engineer - Agents at Buildkite'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-engineer-agents-buildkite-anz-region-8tkpr20yp5v9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Senior Engineer - Agents at Buildkite

- **Company:** Buildkite
- **Location:** ANZ Region
- **Posted:** 2026-08-24
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/buildkite/jobs/5399252008

## Job description

## About Buildkite

Buildkite's CI platform is trusted by the world's leading engineering teams, helping ship software used by more than 1 billion people every day. Companies including Canva, Meta, Mistral AI, and NVIDIA rely on Buildkite to run builds, tests, and deployments on their infrastructure, ours, or both — giving them the speed, reliability, and flexibility to ship with confidence.

## About the Role

Somewhere right now, an engineer has pushed a change and is watching a build run. What's doing that work is the Buildkite Agent — and that's what this team looks after. It’s the open-source agent that engineers around the world have running on their own machines, in their own clouds, in Buildkite’s own hosted agents, anywhere and everywhere Buildkite’s CI runs.

It's a critical repo to own. The team sits at an exciting intersection — deeply technical infrastructure work on one side, the fast-moving world of AI agents on the other, and our own agent sandwiched in the middle. It's the piece everything else leans on, so the details count. The people relying on you are your fellow engineers shipping their own features.

The systems you'll look after can't be paused or casually restarted. We need to constantly iterate and update. That's the nature of it, and it's most of what makes it interesting. You'll have work you can point at and be proud of, and a sharp, opinionated team who'll happily spend an afternoon in a hard problem with you. A few months in, we'd expect you to be fully owning something that matters.

## What You'll Do

Ship

- Break big problems into small things that go to production this week, rather than perfect things that go to production in eight months.
- Own features end-to-end — from the idea, through the trade-offs, to the rollout, to what happens when it misbehaves in production.
- Design for a world where things fail partially and constantly: careful rollouts, migrations you can reverse, and observability you'd actually want during an incident.

Own

- Take a problem and get obsessive about it. Dig as deep as it takes. Come back with an answer and a plan.
- Rotate through Sweep — two weeks in every eight, protecting the team's project time by fielding what comes in, working with Support and Solutions Engineers, and getting people answers fast. It's the quick-hit, high-endorphin end of the job.
- Bring ideas to the roadmap, not just execution against it. If it's more valuable than what's already planned, we'll swap it in.
- Handle incidents and put out problem embers before they become problematic fires.

Communicate

- Explain what you're doing, what you found, and what you're worried about — clearly, in writing and out loud, to engineers and non-engineers alike.
- Pair, review, and give feedback that makes the code and the person better.
- Use AI tooling like a power tool, not autopilot: throw an agent at the problem, then verify what comes back.

This Is You If...

- You'd rather show us than tell us. You can point at things you've built, things you've changed, and things you've owned — and talk about them in the first person.
- You ship small and often. Your instinct when facing an eight-month problem is to find the quick prototype and get it in front of people.
- You get obsessive. When something's broken or slow or ugly, you can't leave it alone. You go find out why.
- You do it anyway. You're comfortable saying "I hadn't done this before and it was uncomfortable, but I worked out how". And "that's not my job" isn't in your vocabulary.
- You're a strong communicator. You keep people around you informed without being asked. You're comfortable having an opinion in a room full of people who also have opinions.
- You have real production ownership behind you. Not "I was on the team" but, "I was responsible, and here's what broke and what I changed."
- You are highly proficient with Go, or Ruby, and you're not precious about either. Go is our primary language across the agent and infrastructure. Ruby on Rails is the backbone of the platform. You'll need genuine experience in at least one — and the comfort to move between languages as the tooling landscape shifts underneath all of us.

Bonus Points for experience with;

- Kubernetes & AWS — we run cloud-native infrastructure at scale.
- Terraform — we manage infrastructure as code and value reusable, maintainable modules.
- PostgreSQL — query optimisation, schema design, or running relational databases under load.
- React & GraphQL — our frontend and API layer.
- You've worked on developer tooling, CI/CD, or anything where your users are engineers with strong opinions.
- You've written publicly about a problem you chased down — a post-mortem, a deep dive, a "why is this slow" investigation.

When You Apply — Come With a Story

This conversation will come up early, so maybe be prepared for it:

Tell us about something you built and shipped quickly. Not the biggest thing you've ever worked on, but maybe the one where you broke a problem down, made a call, and got something small and useful into production faster than anyone expected. What did you skip? What did you get wrong? What happened next?

That conversation is the heart of our process. It's worth thinking about beforehand.

## Benefits

- Work from anywhere in the world for up to 6 weeks a year, on top of a fully remote setup — great work doesn't have to happen from one desk.
- 20 days paid annual leave plus 10 days sick & carer's leave — actively encouraged, we want you to be at your best and time off is a part of that.
- 16 weeks paid parental leave for primary carers (6 for secondary) — becoming a parent is life changing and we're committed to supporting you and your family through it.
- A remote-work allowance for home-office kit, co-working, or working elsewhere — we want you to have everything you need to be set up for success in your role.
- Confidential EAP & mental health support — sometimes life gets hard. You should be able to access the resources and support you need.
- Support for learning and growth — with time and budget for conferences, courses, and coaching so you have the opportunity to grow, improve your craft, and build mastery.
- Retirement and health coverage (based on your region) — build towards your future, your way.

Exact benefits may vary slightly by country. We'll walk through the specifics for your location.

What Happens Next

Every application gets a response. We aim to move quickly through our hiring process and make it as stress free as possible for everyone.

If this sounds like how you already work, apply. If you've got questions first, reach out, we'd rather have the conversation. 🌈 Equal Opportunity Employer

At 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 accommodations@buildkite.com.

## About Buildkite

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Buildkite provides a hybrid-cloud continuous integration (CI) and delivery platform that runs on customer-owned infrastructure, enabling fast, secure, and scalable software delivery.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: Melbourne, Australia
- **Founded**: 2013
- **Founders**: Keith Pitt, Tim Lucas, Lachlan Donald

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Developer Tools (CI/CD), DevOps, Software Delivery
- Target customers: B2B, serving engineering teams from startups to large enterprises (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber, Airbnb, Canva, Shopify, Block, Slack, Boston Dynamics, Reddit)
- Mission or purpose statement: "Unblock developer innovation across the globe."

## Products & Services
- **[Buildkite Pipelines]**: A hybrid CI/CD platform where the control plane runs in the cloud but build agents execute on the customer’s own infrastructure. Offers unlimited parallelism, dynamic pipelines, wait/block/trigger steps, LLM integrations, and conditional logic for complete workflow control.
- **[Buildkite Test Engine]**: A test analytics product that provides intelligent test splitting, performance insights, and real-time flaky test isolation to reduce wait times on slow test suites.
- **[Buildkite Package Registries]**: Native package and artifact management (acquired via Packagecloud in 2023) to secure the software supply chain and accelerate builds/deployments across any ecosystem.
- **[Buildkite Mobile Delivery Cloud]**: A preconfigured environment for accelerating mobile app deployment.
- **[Buildkite MCP Server]**: Connects AI tools to pipeline data with precision log access and token optimization.
- **[Agentic Workflow Components]**: Flexible components for building AI-powered workflows with complete control, including Universal Pipeline Triggers and flaky test routing to AI agents.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Over $200 million (as of CEO transition announcement, 2023/2024)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $41.7M (Series A: $28M led by OpenView with General Catalyst in 2020; Series B: $31M led by OneVentures and AirTree in 2022; plus earlier seed/angel rounds)
- **Annual Revenue**: Approximately $30.4M (LinkedIn estimate)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: OpenView, General Catalyst, OneVentures, AirTree Ventures
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Supports over 60,000 users from leading global software organizations.
    - Customers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber, Airbnb, Canva, Shopify, Block, Slack, Boston Dynamics, and Reddit.
    - In 2023, acquired Packagecloud to extend into native package and artifact management.
    - Headcount of 115 employees (as of mid-2025), with +3.6% monthly workforce growth and +22.6% yearly LinkedIn follower growth.
    - Reddit cut mobile CI build times by up to 50% using Buildkite; Rippling reduced CI/CD costs by 50% using AWS Spot Instances with Buildkite.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Hybrid Architecture**: A unique "control plane in the cloud, agents on customer infrastructure" model that offers flexibility and security, aging into a prescient position as competitors moved to fully managed, prescriptive runtimes.
- **Composability & Flexibility**: Provides "composable primitives" rather than a rigid platform, allowing teams to build workflows their way.
- **Performance**: Massive parallelization capabilities, with top 1,000 pipelines seeing a 90% reduction in build times (saving over 18,000 years of developer time in 2023).
- **Trusted by Tech Giants**: Serves some of the most demanding engineering organizations in the world (OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber, Airbnb, Canva, Shopify, Block).

## Strategic Focus
- **AI-Native Workflows**: Deepening AI integrations with MCP servers, LLM connectors, and agentic workflow components to meet the demands of AI-led development.
- **Platform Expansion**: Growing beyond core CI into test analytics, package management, and mobile delivery to become a comprehensive Scale-Out Delivery Platform.
- **Scaling the Team**: Actively hiring across engineering (Platform, ML, Security), sales, customer success, and developer relations, with a focus on senior and staff-level roles.
- **Global Reach**: Operating in 8 countries (Australia, United States, New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Germany, Japan) with a fully remote team.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-first since 2013**: A globally distributed team working from over 60 cities. No set office hours; flexible schedules to accommodate life commitments.
- **Small Team, Global Impact**: Emphasizes that small teams can achieve big things, with every employee being an important part of the company.
- **Growth Opportunities**: In a growing company (115 employees), employees work on a wide range of projects and ship work that directly impacts customers.
- **Engineering Culture**: Deeply technical, customer-first philosophy. The company values "Empower others," "Maintain momentum," and "Community." Trust is a core principle—teams get context and direction, then are trusted to make decisions.
- **Notable Perks**: Flexible work hours, ability to work from home, co-working spaces, or cat cafés. The interview process includes a "Craft Interview" focusing on productivity, team player, customer obsession, and curiosity.
- **Current Open Roles** (as of mid-2025): Engineering Manager - Platform, Escalations Engineer, Staff ML Engineer, Staff Security Engineer, VP of Engineering - Product, Senior Community Engineer, Staff Developer Relations Engineer, Staff Customer Success Manager, Technical Account Manager, Account Executive, Brand roles, and more.

## Sources
1. [Buildkite About Page](https://buildkite.com/about/company/)
2. [Buildkite Careers Page](https://buildkite.com/about/careers/)
3. [Buildkite Product Page](https://www.buildkite.com/)
4. [Buildkite LinkedIn Profile](https://au.linkedin.com/company/buildkite)
5. [Buildkite Jobs on Greenhouse](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/buildkite/jobs/5121800008)

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