Senior Community Engineer

About BuildkiteAt 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, Canva, Shopify, PagerDuty, and Lyft.

Job Overview

We’re looking for a Senior Community Engineer to help build the cult of Buildkite; harnessing customer trust and love, translating that into technical distribution and earning credibility through effective authenticity. This is a hardcore eng role with a public surface area. You will be one of the technical faces of Buildkite, online, in the ecosystem, and regularly IRL in the Bay Area. Your goal is to make devs feel in their bones that Buildkite is the real deal: technically serious, culturally distinct and built by builders.

You’ll do that by spiking and shipping tangible prototype proof, showing up in the right conversations with real answers, turn customer reality into compelling stories and building community by nurturing a sense of belonging. Community trust is your KPI. The bar is intentionally high; we will only hire someone with a genuinely strong eng background, deep comfort in devtools and community receipts.

🚀 What You’ll Do

Be an aspirational engineer

• Ship production-grade reference implementations that show what “good” looks like with Buildkite
• Build and maintain tools and plugins that solve real problems and raise the ecosystem bar
• Respect public artifacts: versioned, documented, tested, and maintained with care

Foster the cult of Buildkite

• Show up with the distinct Buildkite point-of-view: what we believe about CI, dev workflows, reliability, craft and the future
• Create moments that make Buildkite feel alive: sandboxes, immersive customer war stories, high-signal posts, hot takes with receipts, walkthroughs, behind-the-scenes builds, live demos, event moments, and community rituals that developers actually want to be part of
• Show up consistently and visibly: you are part of our brand. You’re comfortable being known, being quoted, and occasionally being wrong in public

Be the eng in the arena

• Engage where CI conversations happen and earn trust by being technically precise, calm, and genuinely useful
• Triage messy edge cases with customers and the community
• Build tight loops with our world-class Prod/Eng/Support teams; what’s breaking, what’s confusing, what’s missing, and what we’re going to do about it

Customer storytelling as technical truth

• Turn real customer work into credible proof to show how the best engineering teams in the world utilise Buildkite
• Capture the raw material that makes stories compelling and believable
• Co-create with customers and champions; help them tell the story well without sanding off reality

Build champions and belonging

• Identify and nurture champions; maintainers, power users, repeat contributors, and future speakers, geared as a durable learning and trust engine
• Design community pathways; how a curious engineer becomes a user→becomes a confident practitioner→becomes a public advocate; and, what we need to ship to support that journey

Run an OS that compounds

You’ll operate with a lightweight cadence that scales beyond you;

• Build loop: a steady drumbeat of shipping that reduces adoption friction
• Signal loop: structured capture of community/customer pain→categorisation→routing→action with clear ownership
• Proof loop: repeatable customer storytelling pipeline from discovery→capture→technical review→publish→distribution
• Culture loop: consistent personality, rituals, and moments that grow FOMO and the cult of Buildkite
• Trust loop: simple, clear measurement reporting that proves we’re progressively earning trust

Represent Buildkite with authority and joy

• Speak, demo, and teach in formats engineers respect: talks, workshops, livestreams, meetups, and events (some travel in NA is necessary for this role)
• Build relationships with maintainers and tool builders across the CI/CD ecosystem — the people who shape what “good” becomes next.

🎨 What You Bring

This role requires deep engineering focus and the desire to be visible

• Engineering background and CI fluency; you’ve shipped and operated production systems, and you have the hunger to define a new system
• Strong debugging + systems thinking; you can take a messy, multi-factor failure, reduce it to something actionable and translate that into a durable open asset
• Public-facing instinct; you’re comfortable being a recognisable voice. You don’t need to be loud, but you do need to be present
• Taste and judgment; you know the difference between “content” and “proof.” You protect trust and avoid anything that feels hollow, spammy, or inauthentic
• Clear technical communication; you write and explain with precision and empathy, speaking with rather than speaking at
• High-agency collaboration; you partner tightly with Prod/Eng/Support/Brand while owning outcomes cross-functionally
• Comfort working async in a high-trust environment where you own problems end-to-end

Additional Experience That’s a Plus

• You’ve built/maintained CI platforms, developer tooling, plugins, or infra at scale
• Public technical proof: OSS contributions, plugins, talks, deep technical writing, credible demos and or a track record of being a trusted voice in communities
• Experience shaping dev-facing narrative; turning messy reality into clear, useful, technically honest storytelling
• Experience handling logistics for meetups, workshops, office hours, or community programs where trust and belonging are the output, whether for orgs or for communities
• Familiarity with devtool dynamics; credibility loops, ecosystems, champions, and product-centric growth in technical markets

✨ 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 and benefits package
• Flexible, remote-first culture
• Opportunities for professional growth and advancement
• Help shape a proactive, world-class support function for enterprise customers
• An inclusive, innovative culture where your ideas make a real impact