Senior Engineer (Pipelines)

About Buildkite

At Buildkite, our mission is to unblock every developer on the planet. We’ve rethought how software delivery should work and have built a platform that is fast, reliable, secure, and able to scale to the needs of the most demanding high-growth tech companies globally including Airbnb, Shopify, Canva, PagerDuty, Lyft, and Pinterest.

Job Overview

In this role, you’ll help design, build, and scale tools that empower some of the world’s best software engineering teams. You’ll collaborate closely with engineers, designers, and product managers to deliver impactful features and improvements while working on challenges at the intersection of developer experience, scalability, and performance.

This is a highly collaborative, hands-on role where you’ll contribute to product development, influence architectural decisions, and help shape the future of Buildkite’s platform.

What You’ll Do

Collaborate with the engineering team to shape upcoming feature or fix

Work deeply in our Ruby on Rails monolith, including our PostgreSQL databases

Investigate and resolve issues in our production systems — following a problem from symptom to root cause

Provide or respond to feedback on GitHub pull requests

Help customers unblock themselves by diagnosing product behaviour or pipeline issues

Iterate on schema and data changes, and ensure migrations and deploys remain safe and smooth (we ship code on Fridays!)

Contribute to architectural discussions and help steer the technical direction of the product

What You Bring

5+ years of experience in engineering

Have deep experience designing, developing, and maintaining complex Ruby on Rails applications in production

Comfortable working with performance at scale from N+1 queries to indexing strategies to diagnosing slow paths

Experience using observability tools like Datadog, Honeycomb, etc.

Care about code quality and know how to balance perfect with practical

Enjoy solving hard problems with minimal supervision. You can zoom out to see the big picture and zoom in to debug a specific query, API call, or race condition

Comfortable wearing many hats: helping a customer one moment, pitching an idea to the team the next, digging into the database, or refining product requirements

Understand good development practices: writing clear commits, thoughtful pull requests, and reliable tests with tools like RSpec

Key Technical Stacks \& Components:

Ruby on Rails

PostgreSQL

GraphQL

React

Amazon ECS

RDS Performance Insights

Terraform

Redis

Golang

Kafka

✨ Why Join Buildkite

At Buildkite, we value kindness, autonomy, and collaboration. You’ll be part of a remote-first company where your work can make a meaningful impact – empowering engineers worldwide to build and deliver better software faster.

Competitive compensation, including salary, equity, and benefits package

Flexible, remote-first culture

Opportunities for professional growth, leadership, and technical ownership

Work alongside talented, passionate engineers building world-class developer tools

A collaborative, inclusive, and innovative culture where your ideas make a real impact

Equal Opportunity Employer

At Buildkite, we value diversity and celebrate all types of skills, backgrounds, and experiences. We’re dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment and providing reasonable accommodations throughout our recruitment process.

If you need any accommodations or support during the application or interview process, please reach out to us at accommodations@buildkite.com.