Engineering Manager - Platform

At Buildkite, our mission is to unblock every developer on the planet. We've rethought how software delivery should work and built a platform that is fast, reliable, secure, and scalable enough for the most demanding high-growth tech companies in the world — including Uber, OpenAI, Shopify, Airbnb, Canva, Pinterest, PagerDuty, and Lyft.

We've been remote-first since 2013 and Australian-founded. Engineering is concentrated in AU/NZ and US Pacific time zones to maximise synchronous overlap.

About the Role

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Platform team — the team responsible for scaling and enhancing the Postgres-powered Rails monolith that runs on AWS Fargate and underpins our product. The Platform team continuously improves our deploy tooling, dogfoods new features, and supports product engineering teams with the shared patterns, tooling, and processes that let them ship safely.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll lead and grow the team, collaborate with stakeholders across engineering and product, and make sure the platform stays reliable, scalable, and secure as the company grows. You'll still be in the code, still on customer calls, still making the tactical call when it matters.

You'll be a key part of Buildkite's engineering leadership, shaping how we scale and how product teams deliver.

🛠 About the Team

The Platform team owns the foundation that every product engineering team depends on:

• The Postgres-powered Rails monolith running on AWS Fargate.
• Deploy tooling and the safety practices — canaries, blue/green, smoke tests — that protect every release.
• Shared patterns, libraries, and processes used across product engineering.
• Infrastructure upgrades, SOC2 compliance, and on-call coordination.
• Key vendor relationships, including AWS.

🚀 What You'll Do

• Lead and support the Platform team — build a culture of collaboration, technical excellence, and psychological safety.
• Partner with other Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and Engineering Leadership to shape what the team works on next, plan for it, and rally the team around it.
• Drive delivery of work that improves the scalability, reliability, and security of our platform.
• Run regular 1:1s — understand what motivates each engineer and help them grow their career.
• Unblock the team — remove bottlenecks, make tactical calls, get into the code when it helps.
• Review code and technical plans. Make tactical code changes to support the team when it matters.
• Join customer calls to hear what's breaking and shape the team's direction around real signal.
• Evaluate and manage key vendor relationships — usage, plans, recommendations.

📋 What We're Looking For

• Proven experience leading and mentoring engineering teams, with a track record of collaboration and delivery.
• Strong Platform / SRE background — you've maintained large-scale applications and made them reliable.
• Familiarity with the kind of stack we run: Rails, Ruby, Postgres, AWS containerised environments, Terraform.
• Deep understanding of deployment safety — canaries, blue/green, smoke tests — operated, not just understood.
• Operational maturity — infrastructure upgrades, compliance (SOC2 a plus), and on-call structures.
• Strong written communication. We're remote-first and async-first.
• Customer instinct — you engage with stakeholders, understand needs, and translate them into team direction.

💻 Tech Stack

• Ruby on Rails — the application layer.
• Postgres — primary datastore.
• AWS Fargate — containerised compute.
• Terraform — infrastructure as code.
• CI/CD — canaries, blue/green, smoke tests. We use our own product.

🗓 A Typical Day Might Include

• A 1:1 with an engineer on the team — what they're working on, what they're stuck on, where they want to grow.
• Reviewing a PR on deploy tooling and leaving substantive feedback.
• Pairing on a tricky migration or a thorny rollback question.
• A customer call to hear where the platform is creating friction.
• A vendor review — usage, plan, alternatives, recommendation.
• Writing the next plan in shared docs and Slack threads.

✨ Why Join Buildkite

You'll lead the team that makes every other engineering team's work possible — the platform that powers CI for some of the most demanding engineering organisations in the world. You'll have the autonomy to shape direction, the technical depth to stay hands-on, and a remote-first team built around trust.