Staff Engineer - Releases

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Buildkite's CI platform is trusted by the world's leading engineering teams, shipping software to over 1,000,000,000 daily users. Job Overview We're looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Releases team. In this role, you'll help solve some of the most challenging technical problems we face as we continue to scale Buildkite's platform. You'll drive architectural decisions, lead technical strategy, and work closely with engineers, designers, and product managers to deliver impactful improvements. Staff Engineers at Buildkite are hands-on technical leaders. You'll influence how we design, build, and scale systems while supporting other engineers to deliver their best work. 🔧 About the Team The Releases team is building Buildkite's release control plane - a foundational layer that gives platform teams one trusted, auditable view of what shipped, where, and whether it met governance requirements. Our initial focus is designing a canonical release model (service, environment, commit, artefact, actor, status), reliable ingestion from Pipelines and GitHub Deployments, and an immutable evidence trail that powers policy gates and DORA metrics. Beyond that foundation, the same platform becomes a progressive delivery product: staged rollouts, canary analysis, blue/green deploys, health-based promotion, and automatic rollback. In short, we're moving from observing and governing releases to orchestrating and optimising them - integrating cleanly with existing CD systems rather than forcing a full replacement. 🚀 What You'll Do Own Technical Direction for the Releases Platform Design the release architecture and core data model, including the canonical release entity and its relationships across services, environments, artefacts, and actors Lead key technical decisions around security, reliability, and scale - particularly for the immutable evidence trail and policy gate infrastructure Drive the hardest cross-system integrations, including ingestion from Pipelines and GitHub Deployments Ensure the platform is extensible enough to support progressive delivery capabilities (canary analysis, staged rollouts, health-based promotion, automatic rollback) without requiring customers to replace existing CD tooling Build and Improve the Releases Platform Design, build, and scale tools and systems relied on by some of the best engineering teams in the world Solve complex technical challenges around performance, reliability, and scalability Work closely with customers and stakeholders to deeply understand their release and governance challenges, and deliver practical, high-impact solutions Drive improvements to developer experience through better tooling, automation, and processes Lead and Unblock Investigate and resolve complex performance and reliability issues across the stack Explore systems at every layer - from infrastructure patterns to backend services and data stores Share knowledge and drive engineering best practices across teams through documentation, mentorship, and pairing Support the wider engineering organisation by contributing to cross-team tooling, infrastructure, and frameworks Communicate trade-offs effectively and build alignment around technical decisions 🎨 Skills & Experience We Value Technical Expertise Proven experience working in production environments at scale, ideally using Go, Ruby on Rails, or similar languages Experience designing event-driven or audit-log systems - immutable records, event sourcing, or append-only data models are a strong plus Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure and deploying complex, containerised applications (AWS experience preferred) Familiarity with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases, including reasoning about performance and replication Comfortable solving challenges in distributed systems, observability, and infrastructure reliability Domain Experience Familiarity with CD systems, deployment pipelines, or release orchestration platforms (e.g. Spinnaker, Argo Rollouts, Flux, or similar) Understanding of progressive delivery patterns: canary deployments, blue/green, feature flags, health-based promotion, and rollback strategies Experience with DORA metrics, release governance, or compliance/audit requirements in regulated or large-scale engineering environments Background in integrating with source control and CI/CD platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Buildkite, etc.) Collaboration and Communication Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in a remote-first environment Ability to distil complex technical concepts into clear explanations for diverse audiences A collaborative, pragmatic mindset - balancing technical quality with business context Comfortable mentoring engineers and leading technical discussions across teams Additional Experience Kubernetes, Terraform, or other infrastructure-as-code tools Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or other streaming/event-driven systems Background in SRE, systems prog

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