Buildkite - VP of Engineering

• The combination of things going on here doesn't come up often: • Gnarly problems, not abstractions. Buildkite runs continuously, can't be paused, and experiences partial failure as a normal operating condition. The systems carry stateful guarantees for the companies pushing the most code in the world. Migrations, rollouts, reversibility, and live operations are real engineering problems with real consequences. • Gnarly problems, not abstractions. • Scale that's already real, before you start. Software shipped through Buildkite reaches over a billion daily users. The customer list — Uber, OpenAI, Shopify, Airbnb, Canva, Pinterest, and most of the frontier AI labs — sets the bar for "scale" externally, not internally. You don't have to argue for why your work matters. • Scale that's already real, before you start. • Five product teams, one mandate. Pipelines, Test Engine, Packages, Agents & Compute, and Releases — each at a different maturity stage, each with a different growth profile, all with their own nuance. You set the trade-offs and the priorities across the portfolio. • Five product teams, one mandate. • A pace that demands decisions. Workloads have doubled in the last three months. The role reports to our CTO and co-founder and you have full decision-making authority over delivery, team structure, and technical direction. • A pace that demands decisions. • 10x ahead, not behind. Customers are asking us to support 5–10x growth this year. AI agents will increasingly be a meaningful share of what's pushing code through Buildkite. The role gives you real decision rights and impact on how software is deployed across the globe. • 10x ahead, not behind. • What you'll own; • Product engineering delivery. Velocity, quality, and reliability across all five product teams. Setting and upholding a high bar for technical excellence, decision-making, and shipped outcomes. Benchmarking delivery performance against comparable product engineering organisations and setting credible, ambitious targets. • Product engineering delivery. • Engineering managers and technical leaders. Coaching the EMs in building high-performing teams. Growing Staff and Principal engineers into broader influence. Developing the next generation of EMs from within. Partnering with Talent and People on staffing plans that surface capability gaps and deliberate bets before they become problems. • Engineering managers and technical leaders. • The product-engineering partnership. Translating product strategy into delivery reality. Driving the hardest trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality. Making engineering constraints legible to product, commercial, and executive stakeholders — and product strategy legible back to engineers. • The product-engineering partnership. • Technical direction across product engineering. Architectural consistency across product teams. Build/buy/partner decisions across the product portfolio. AI-augmented engineering practices to maximise the leverage of small, high-calibre teams. • Technical direction across product engineering. • Operational excellence for product surfaces. Reliability, performance, and incident response for customer-facing surfaces. Systematic reduction of product-related incidents and repeat root causes. Sustainable on-call rotations across AU/NZ and US Pacific. • Operational excellence for product surfaces. • Engineering's voice to the business and to customers. A trusted technical voice to the executive team and, where it warrants it, to the board. Direct engagement with enterprise customers on roadmap, architecture, and reliability conversations. • Engineering's voice to the business and to customers. • You'd be our sort of person if you have; • A leadership track record that fits. Proven experience leading product engineering organisations through meaningful scaling — managing managers, developing staff-level ICs, and owning delivery across multiple product lines concurrently. References ready to speak to your coaching and sponsorship. A track record of delivering outsized results with small teams through sharp prioritisation and leverage. • A leadership track record that fits. • Technical credibility. A hands-on engineering background sufficient to earn trust from senior engineers and make sound architectural calls. You don't need to be writing production code, but you need to read it fluently and challenge technical decisions on merit. Experience leading teams building developer tools, CI/CD, infrastructure products, or similarly technical B2B products is strongly preferred. Comfortable with Buildkite's core stack: Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, Go, and PostgreSQL at scale. • Technical credibility. • The right operating style. Quantitative — you use data to set targets, surface risk, and measure whether engineering is actually working. A clear written and verbal communicator able to drive decisions with urgency without resorting to theatre. Comfortable leading a distributed team across AU/NZ and US Pacific. Strong opinions on what separates a high-performing product engineering organisation from a merely busy one. • The right operating style. • Want to talk before applying? • If you'd prefer a conversation before submitting a formal application, reach out directly to Simon McSorley at [email protected] • [email protected]