Description
We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead Developer Experience at Buildkite, building AI-led development loops that increase the productivity of our engineers.
Our goal is to double R&D output per engineer over the next 12 months across a team of around 80 engineers, and this role is key to achieving that. You'll focus on improving the developer experience, including CI, build tooling, codebase health, deployment paths, and AI-assisted development loops.
As a Staff Engineer, you'll own the end-to-end developer experience for around 80 engineers. Your responsibilities will include:
- Leading the goal of doubling R&D output per engineer
- Staying hands-on and shipping work yourself, making low-risk, high-leverage changes in unfamiliar code
- Building credibility and relationships with the engineering team to get buy-in for your ideas
- Pushing the frontier on agentic coding tooling, evaluating it, rolling it out, and measuring its effectiveness
To succeed in this role, you'll need:
- A strong software engineering background with real production experience
- Experience inside a platform engineering organisation or leading AI and developer tooling efforts
- Evidence of making engineering teams measurably faster
- Exposure to meaningful scale and its associated problems
- Fluency with agentic coding tools and a good instinct for when to trust them
- Influence skills to lead everyone and manage no one
- An intolerance for going slowly and a high tolerance for trying new things
Additional experience that's useful includes:
- Deep CI/CD experience
- Time in a high-performance engineering environment
- Breadth across languages and stacks
- Experience instrumenting and reporting on developer productivity
We offer a range of benefits, including:
- Flexible work arrangements, including working 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
- A remote-work allowance for home-office kit, co-working, or working elsewhere
- Confidential EAP & mental health support
- Support for learning and growth, including time and budget for conferences, courses, and coaching
- Retirement and health coverage (based on your region)