Senior Engineer - Agents

Ship

Break big problems into small things that go to production this week, rather than perfect things that go to production in eight months.

Own features end-to-end — from the idea, through the trade-offs, to the rollout, to what happens when it misbehaves in production.

Design for a world where things fail partially and constantly: careful rollouts, migrations you can reverse, and observability you'd actually want during an incident.

Own

Take a problem and get obsessive about it. Dig as deep as it takes. Come back with an answer and a plan.

Rotate through Sweep — two weeks in every eight, protecting the team's project time by fielding what comes in, working with Support and Solutions Engineers, and getting people answers fast. It's the quick-hit, high-endorphin end of the job.

Bring ideas to the roadmap, not just execution against it. If it's more valuable than what's already planned, we'll swap it in.

Handle incidents and put out problem embers before they become problematic fires.

Communicate

Explain what you're doing, what you found, and what you're worried about — clearly, in writing and out loud, to engineers and non-engineers alike.

Pair, review, and give feedback that makes the code and the person better.

Use AI tooling like a power tool, not autopilot: throw an agent at the problem, then verify what comes back.

You'd rather show us than tell us. You can point at things you've built, things you've changed, and things you've owned — and talk about them in the first person.

You ship small and often. Your instinct when facing an eight-month problem is to find the quick prototype and get it in front of people.

You get obsessive. When something's broken or slow or ugly, you can't leave it alone. You go find out why.

You do it anyway. You're comfortable saying "I hadn't done this before and it was uncomfortable, but I worked out how". And "that's not my job" isn't in your vocabulary.

You're a strong communicator. You keep people around you informed without being asked. You're comfortable having an opinion in a room full of people who also have opinions.

You have real production ownership behind you. Not "I was on the team" but, "I was responsible, and here's what broke and what I changed."

You are highly proficient with Go, or Ruby, and you're not precious about either. Go is our primary language across the agent and infrastructure. Ruby on Rails is the backbone of the platform. You'll need genuine experience in at least one — and the comfort to move between languages as the tooling landscape shifts underneath all of us.

Kubernetes & AWS — we run cloud-native infrastructure at scale.

Terraform — we manage infrastructure as code and value reusable, maintainable modules.

PostgreSQL — query optimisation, schema design, or running relational databases under load.

React & GraphQL — our frontend and API layer.

You've worked on developer tooling, CI/CD, or anything where your users are engineers with strong opinions.

You've written publicly about a problem you chased down — a post-mortem, a deep dive, a "why is this slow" investigation.

This conversation will come up early, so maybe be prepared for it:

Tell us about something you built and shipped quickly. Not the biggest thing you've ever worked on, but maybe the one where you broke a problem down, made a call, and got something small and useful into production faster than anyone expected. What did you skip? What did you get wrong? What happened next?

That conversation is the heart of our process. It's worth thinking about beforehand.

Every application gets a response. We aim to move quickly through our hiring process and make it as stress free as possible for everyone.

If this sounds like how you already work, apply. If you've got questions first, reach out, we'd rather have the conversation.

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.