Senior Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

We’re hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to join our Platform engineering organisation. The Platform team builds and operates the shared foundations that help Buildkite teams ship and scale products securely and reliably.

This is a hands-on role for a senior platform engineer with strong cloud and infrastructure foundations. You’ll design and operate reliable Kubernetes platforms across multiple clusters, solve distributed-systems challenges, automate infrastructure at scale, and take ownership of the systems you build.

🏢 About Buildkite

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 able to scale to the needs of demanding high-growth technology companies globally, including Airbnb, Shopify, Canva, PagerDuty, Lyft, and Pinterest.

🎯 The Role

Our mission is to build the foundations that let Buildkite teams ship, operate, and scale products securely and reliably. We make the reliable path the easiest path through paved roads for deployment, observability and security.

Buildkite’s customers run some of the world’s most demanding CI/CD and emerging AI workloads. As software development accelerates, CI/CD is becoming a major scaling bottleneck. A shared-platform change can affect every product team, while one unusual workload can expose the platform’s next limit. The infrastructure underneath must behave accordingly.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own substantial parts of Buildkite’s AWS and multi-cluster Kubernetes platform from design through production operation.
• Design reusable, self-service automation for provisioning and operating secure, consistent, and isolated platform environments.
• Deliver regional architecture, request routing, disaster recovery, and tested failover capabilities.
• Improve Kubernetes networking, upgrades, patching, scaling, observability, capacity management, and recovery.
• Make infrastructure and deployments safer through secure defaults, progressive delivery, automated guardrails, clear health signals, and fast rollback.
• Partner with product teams to diagnose distributed-system problems across service, datastore, network, and platform boundaries.
• Turn incidents, capacity limits, and operational signals into durable engineering improvements.
• Write well-tested, observable, documented, and operable systems; lead design discussions, review code, share context, and mentor other engineers.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Clear communication and effective collaboration in a distributed team.
• Technical influence: navigating ambiguity, explaining trade-offs, building consensus, and driving cross-team work
• Developer experience: Experience building CI/CD, internal-platform, or self-service capabilities that make the safe path easier for other engineers.
• Experience owning production systems through growth, failures, migrations, and incidents.
• Production AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Infrastructure as Code: Experience managing production infrastructure with Terraform or an equivalent tool, including DNS, IAM, monitoring, and secrets.
• Strong reliability practices, including observability, incident response, recovery testing, and operational improvement.
• Experience building platforms or self-service capabilities that make secure, reliable delivery easier for engineers.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Multi-region or multi-cluster systems, traffic routing, and disaster recovery.
• Progressive delivery, deployment guardrails, and rollback.
• Platform-level authentication, identity, or compliance controls implemented through engineering rather than paperwork.
• Datastores: Experience operating relational databases, caches, or queues, including migrations, replication, failover, and workload isolation.

🎁 Benefits

• Work from anywhere in the world for up to 6 weeks a year, on top of a fully remote setup — great work doesn't have to happen from one desk.
• 20 days paid annual leave plus 10 days sick & carer's leave — actively encouraged, we want you to be at your best and time off is a part of that.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave for primary carers (6 for secondary) — becoming a parent is life changing and we're committed to supporting you and your family through it.
• A remote-work allowance for home-office kit, co-working, or working elsewhere — we want you to have everything you need to be set up for success in your role.
• Confidential EAP & mental health support — sometimes life gets hard. You should be able to access the resources and support you need.
• Support for learning and growth — with time and budget for conferences, courses, and coaching so you have the opportunity to grow, improve your craft, and build mastery.
• Retirement and health coverage (based on your region) — build towards your future, your way.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

This role is 100 % remote, however it does need to be located in either the ANZ or PST timezone.