Staff Engineer - Releases

Job Overview

Buildkite is looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Releases team. You will drive architectural decisions, lead technical strategy, and solve complex scaling challenges for our CI platform, which supports over 1,000,000,000 daily users. As a hands-on technical leader, you will influence system design and mentor engineers to deliver high-impact solutions.

About the Team

The Releases team is building a foundational release control plane. We are moving from observing and governing releases to orchestrating and optimizing them, including progressive delivery, canary analysis, and automated rollouts, while integrating seamlessly with existing CD systems.

What You’ll Do

Own Technical Direction

• Design the release architecture and core data model (service, environment, commit, artefact, actor, status).
• Lead technical decisions regarding security, reliability, and scale for our immutable evidence trail and policy gate infrastructure.
• Drive cross-system integrations, including ingestion from Pipelines and GitHub Deployments.
• Ensure platform extensibility for progressive delivery capabilities like canary analysis and blue/green deployments.

Build and Improve

• Design and scale systems relied on by world-leading engineering teams.
• Solve complex challenges in performance, reliability, and distributed systems.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to deliver practical, high-impact solutions.

Lead and Unblock

• Resolve complex performance issues across the stack.
• Mentor engineers and drive best practices through documentation and pairing.
• Communicate technical trade-offs and build alignment across the organization.

Skills & Experience

Technical Expertise

• Proven experience in production environments at scale (Go, Ruby on Rails, or similar).
• Experience with event-driven systems, immutable records, or event sourcing.
• Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS) and containerized applications.
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL and distributed systems observability.

Deployment & Release Experience

• Hands-on experience building deployment and release-orchestration platforms.
• Familiarity with CD tooling (Argo CD, Spinnaker, Flux) and workflow engines (Temporal).
• Deep understanding of progressive delivery (canary, blue/green, feature flags, automated rollback).
• Experience with DORA metrics, release governance, and compliance.

Collaboration

• Excellent communication skills for a remote-first environment.
• Pragmatic mindset balancing technical quality with business context.
• Ability to mentor and lead technical discussions across teams.

Why Join Buildkite

• Competitive compensation, including salary and equity.
• Flexible, remote-first culture (ANZ & PST regions).
• Meaningful technical challenges at scale.
• Collaborative, inclusive, and innovative environment.