Cloud Efficiency Engineer (AWS/FinOps) - Buildkite

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.

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Cloud Efficiency Engineer to own our cloud efficiency picture end-to-end. You will trace COGS signals to technical drivers, build cost models, and ship optimizations that reduce spend without compromising reliability, throughput, or customer experience. You will report to the VP Engineering Platform and partner closely with our CTO, Platform engineering, Data, and Finance teams.

What You'll Do

Follow the money

• Trace cost signals to their technical causes (customer-level job costs, GraphQL cost by function, per-operation unit economics).
• Build and maintain cost models for our most common and expensive operations.
• Rank opportunities into a defensible portfolio based on savings, risk, and effort.

Ship the fix

• Implement safe, measurable optimizations in code or configuration.
• Partner with engineering teams to drive larger architectural changes.
• Drive Datadog and observability efficiency alongside AWS.

Prove it landed

• Establish baselines and verify realized savings in production.
• Build guardrails, attribution, and alerting to prevent regressions.
• Translate between engineering and Finance to ensure technical answers for financial questions.

This Is You If...

• You have delivered meaningful, measured AWS savings in a scaled production environment.
• You are a working engineer who reads, writes, and ships code.
• You possess strong systems diagnosis skills and sound trade-off judgment.
• You can influence cross-functional teams you do not manage.
• You stand behind your numbers and methodology.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Datadog/observability cost optimization.
• FinOps engineering experience or background in unit economics.
• Experience with GraphQL at scale, CI/CD, or cloud infrastructure.
• Finance or commercial background alongside engineering.

Benefits

• Work from anywhere in the world for up to 6 weeks a year.
• 20 days paid annual leave plus 10 days sick & carer's leave.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave for primary carers (6 for secondary).
• Remote-work allowance for home-office kit or co-working.
• Confidential EAP & mental health support.
• Support for learning and growth (budget for conferences, courses, and coaching).
• Retirement and health coverage (based on your region).