Senior Engineer - Agents

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.

About the Role

The Buildkite Agent is the open-source engine that powers our CI platform. It is a critical piece of infrastructure that runs on customer machines, in their clouds, and in Buildkite’s hosted environments. As a Senior Engineer on the Agents team, you will work at the intersection of deeply technical infrastructure and the fast-moving world of AI agents.

What You'll Do

Ship

• Break big problems into small, shippable increments.
• Own features end-to-end: from ideation and trade-offs to rollout and production monitoring.
• Design for partial failures with careful rollouts, reversible migrations, and robust observability.

Own

• Deep-dive into complex problems to develop actionable plans.
• Participate in the 'Sweep' rotation (2 weeks every 8) to field support requests and maintain system health.
• Contribute to the product roadmap based on technical insights.
• Manage incidents and proactively address system issues.

Communicate

• Clearly articulate technical concepts to both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
• Pair program and provide constructive code reviews.
• Utilize AI tooling effectively to accelerate development while maintaining verification standards.

This Is You If...

• You ship small and often: You prioritize prototypes and getting value in front of users quickly.
• You are obsessive: You dig deep to understand why systems break or underperform.
• You have production ownership experience: You have a track record of being responsible for systems in production.
• You are a strong communicator: You keep stakeholders informed and are comfortable advocating for your technical opinions.
• Technical Proficiency: You are highly proficient in Go or Ruby and are comfortable moving between languages as needed.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Kubernetes, AWS, and Terraform.
• Proficiency in PostgreSQL (query optimization, schema design).
• Familiarity with React and GraphQL.
• Background in developer tooling, CI/CD, or public technical writing (post-mortems, deep dives).

Benefits

• Work from anywhere: Up to 6 weeks a year of global remote work.
• Leave: 20 days paid annual leave plus 10 days sick/carer's leave.
• Parental Leave: 16 weeks paid for primary carers (6 for secondary).
• Support: Remote-work allowance, confidential EAP/mental health support, and a dedicated budget for learning and growth.
• Security: Retirement and health coverage tailored to your region.