Senior Community Engineer

About this role

<p><strong>About Buildkite</strong><strong><br></strong>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, Canva, Shopify, PagerDuty, and Lyft.</p> <p><strong>Job Overview</strong></p> <p class="p1">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.</p> <p class="p1">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.</p> <p class="p1"><strong><span class="s1">🚀</span> What You’ll Do</strong></p> <p class="p1"><strong>Be an aspirational engineer</strong></p> <ul> <li class="p2">Ship production-grade reference implementations that show what “good” looks like with Buildkite</li> <li class="p2">Build and maintain tools and plugins that solve real problems and raise the ecosystem bar</li> <li class="p2">Respect public artifacts: versioned, documented, tested, and maintained with care</li> </ul> <p class="p1"><strong>Foster the cult of Buildkite</strong></p> <ul> <li class="p1">Show up with the distinct Buildkite point-of-view: what we believe about CI, dev workflows, reliability, craft and the future</li> <li>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,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> and community rituals that developers actually want to be part of</span></li> <li>Show up consistently and visibly: you are part of our brand. You’re comfortable being known, being quoted, and occasionally being wrong in public</li> </ul> <p><strong>Be the eng in the arena</strong></p> <ul> <li>Engage where CI conversations happen and earn trust by being technically precise, calm, and genuinely useful</li> <li>Triage messy edge cases with customers and the community</li> <li>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</li> </ul> <p><strong>Customer storytelling as technical truth</strong></p> <ul> <li>Turn real customer work into credible proof to show how the best engineering teams in the world utilise Buildkite</li> <li>Capture the raw material that makes stories compelling and believable</li> <li>Co-create with customers and champions; help them tell the story well without sanding off reality</li> </ul> <p><strong>Build champions and belonging</strong></p> <ul> <li>Identify and nurture champions; maintainers, power users, repeat contributors, and future speakers, geared as a durable learning and trust engine</li> <li>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</li> </ul> <p><strong>Run an OS that compounds</strong></p> <p>You’ll operate with a lightweight cadence that scales beyond you;</p> <ul> <li>Build loop: a steady drumbeat of shipping that reduces adoption friction</li> <li>Signal loop: structured capture of community/customer pain→categorisation→routing→action with clear ownership</li> <li>Proof loop: repeatable customer storytelling pipeline from discovery→capture→technical review→publish→distribution</li> <li>Culture loop: consistent personality, rituals, and moments that grow FOMO and the cult of Buildkite</li> <li>Trust loop: simple, clear measurement reporting that proves we’re progressively earning trust</li> </ul> <p><strong>Represent Buildkite with authority and joy</strong></p> <ul> <li>Speak, demo, and teach in formats engineers respect: talks, workshops, livestreams, meetups, and events (some travel in NA is necessary for this role)</li> <li>Build relationships with maintainers and tool builders across the CI/CD ecosystem — the people who shape what “good” becomes next.</li> </ul> <p><strong>🎨 What You Bring</strong></p> <p>This role requires deep engineering focus and the desire to be visible</p> <ul> <li>Engineering background and CI fluency; you’ve shipped and operated production systems, and you have the hunger to define a new system</li> <li>Strong debugging + systems thinking; you can take a messy,…