Engineering Manager

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 is able to scale to the needs of the most demanding high-growth tech companies globally including Shopify, Uber, Pinterest, Wayfair, Cruise, PagerDuty, Culture Amp, and Canva.

We're looking for a delivery-focused Engineering Manager, or more accurately a Delivery Leader, to drive a high-performing engineering team building critical infrastructure and systems that power our products and delight our customers. This role requires a hands-on leader who excels in navigating technical complexity and is dedicated to driving teams toward consistently delivering high-impact, customer centred solutions at scale.

In this role, you won't have a Product Manager guiding the roadmap - you will define your team's product goals by working directly with customers and stakeholders (internal and external) to deeply understand their challenges and needs. You will turn that insight into actionable priorities and empower your team to deliver solutions that make a meaningful impact to our customers.

You will be a vital part of Buildkite's leadership team, driving our next phase of growth, scalability, and customer impact. This is a unique opportunity to lead by example, shape direction, and champion engineering excellence—making a meaningful, global impact on how developers build and deliver software.

What You'll Do:

Drive a high performing team and organisational impact:

• Cultivate a remote team culture that emphasises open communication and collaboration, creating an environment where energy, curiosity, and creativity thrive.
• Empathise deeply with our customers' challenges to deliver innovative and delightful experiences that exceed their expectations.
• Proactively collaborate with other Engineering Leaders, Product Managers and the broader Engineering Leadership team to identify the most impactful team goals, plan, and energise and support the team to deliver.
• Set and hold the team accountable to clear, ambitious goals and expectations that align with Buildkite's top priorities and drive outstanding results for our customers.
• Identify and address obstacles that prevent the team from achieving outstanding results for our customers in a sustainable way.
• Lead essential leadership rituals; effective 1:1s, provide regular feedback, and support goal delivery through stand-ups, retrospectives and regular goal tracking.
• Mentor and guide engineers' professional growth and development. Support career progression while ensuring high performance and accountability.

• Balance short-term execution with long-term planning, ensuring the team delivers sustainable impact.

• Be a Delivery Force Multiplier for Your Team:

• Lead from the front - roll up your sleeves and be the glue for the team; do whatever needs to be done to unblock the team.

• Evaluate and communicate tradeoffs, prioritise effectively, listen actively, unblock others, make the final decisions, and have fun
• Review PR's, provide feedback on technical plans, and write PR's that unblock or accelerate the team in a meaningful way.
• Lead by example - continuously energise the team with enthusiasm, positivity, and encouragement (a heavy dose of humor a bonus) - especially during challenging times - to keep momentum high and motivation strong.

What You Bring:

• Proven Leadership: Experience leading and mentoring engineering teams with a strong focus on delivery, collaboration, and team health.
• Customer-Centric Mindset: Demonstrated ability to engage with customers directly and translate their needs into actionable engineering goals.
• Growth mindset: Lead with openness, curiosity, and humility, inspiring continuous development within yourself and your team.
• Technical Depth: Hands-on experience working with large-scale systems. Familiarity with Ruby on Rails, cloud infrastructure (especially AWS), and scalable software architecture is a plus.
• Delivery Focus: A track record of breaking down work, prioritising effectively (a skilled Linear operator a bonus), and delivering projects on time without sacrificing quality or team well-being.
• Problem-Solving Drive: A proactive approach to identifying and resolving blockers, improving workflows, and leading technical initiatives.
• Empathy and Communication: Strong emotional intelligence, active listening skills, and the ability to build trust and alignment in fully remote teams.
• Operational Expertise: Experience managing infrastructure upgrades, technical debt, and compliance requirements (SOC2 experience is a bonus).
• Experience with CI/CD: Understanding of deployment safety practices (smoke tests, canaries, blue/green deploys) and experience improving developer workflows.

Why Join Buildkite?

• At Buildkite, we value kindness, autonomy, and collaboration. You'll be part of a remote first company where your leadership can make a meaningful impact - empowering engineers worldwide to build and deliver better software faster.
• You will be a key member of Buildkites Leadership team, supporting our next phase of growth, scale and impact for our customers.
• We have some incredible benefits designed to support you to achieve outstanding results

Ready to lead and deliver? We'd love to hear from you.

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