Buildkite - VP of Engineering

Remote - ANZ Region - USA *3mo ago

Remote Vp NA Artificial Intelligence VP of Engineering Co-Founder Shopify Staff Development Canva Reporting Coaching

Requirements

• 🔧 The problem worth solving • Buildkite runs continuously. It can't be paused, and partial failure is a normal operating condition. The systems carry stateful guarantees for the companies pushing the most code on the planet — Uber, OpenAI, Shopify, Airbnb, Canva, Pinterest, and most of the frontier AI labs. Migrations, rollouts, reversibility, live operations: real engineering problems with real consequences. • Most of our competitors weren't architected for this moment — hybrid, massive concurrency, AI-scale workloads. We were, and customers feel the difference in every build. • You'd lead five product teams, each at a different stage of maturity. Working with your EMs and the wider leadership group, you'll set the trade-offs across the portfolio and translate the vision into something each team can run with. AI agents will soon be a big share of what's pushing code through Buildkite; part of the fun is working out together how to help those agents live their best lives. • 🚀 What you'll own • Reporting to our CTO and co-founder, you'll be accountable for the pace, quality, and impact of everything these teams ship — and for growing the managers and technical leaders who run them. • That means holding a high bar for delivery and technical decision-making across all five teams; coaching your EMs and growing Staff and Principal engineers into broader influence; partnering with product leadership to turn strategy into reality and work through the hard trade-offs together; and helping the whole team get closer to its customers. You'll also be engineering's voice to the executive team, the board when it warrants it, and enterprise customers on the calls that matter. • You'll have real decision-making authority over delivery, team structure, and technical direction — with a co-founder alongside you — and you'll be measured on what ships, what customers adopt, and the strength of the bench you build, not activity. • ✨ The person we're picturing • You care about building a high-performance engineering culture, but you have genuine taste in technical decision-making — you can tell the difference between a team that's busy and one that's shipping. You empower people to move fast, then hold them to account for what they build. You bring product thinking into engineering management, and you're wired for high velocity. • You lead like a founder: you'll dig into a problem you don't understand and use it to inform strategy. You have a track record of outsized results from small teams — managing managers, developing staff-level ICs, and owning delivery across multiple product lines at once. • The one place we won't budge: you've led product engineering through real scaling and owned the outcome alongside your teams — not advised on it from a distance. • Is this you? • You're a strong fit if you: • lead with product instinct and technical taste, not just process • get energy from intensity and ambiguity, and turn "I don't understand this yet" into strategy • want real decision rights and are happy to be held to what ships • can read the code, challenge an architectural call on merit, and earn trust from senior engineers (our stack: Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, Go, and PostgreSQL at scale) • Probably not the right role if you: • prefer a mature org with the scaffolding already in place • like a clean line between setting strategy and owning delivery • measure teams by how busy they look rather than what they ship • want the pace to settle down this year — it won't • We're saying this plainly so you can decide for yourself, not to gatekeep. The pace here is real, and it filters as much as it attracts.

Benefits

• 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]