Engineering Manager - Platform

Some engineering managers measure their value by how much the team needs them. The best ones measure the opposite. If you're the second kind — the leader who builds teams that make good calls without you in the room — keep reading. 🔧 The problem worth solving Buildkite's Platform team runs the engine room: a Postgres-powered Rails monolith on AWS Fargate that sits in the critical path for engineering teams at Shopify, Uber, Pinterest, Canva, OpenAI, and Anthropic. They also build the deploy tooling the whole company relies on, dogfood new features before customers see them, and give product engineering the shared patterns that let them ship fast without breaking things. It's the kind of team where the trade-offs are never simple. Proactive versus reactive work. Paying down tech debt versus shipping the next thing. The maintainable solution versus the clever one. Getting those calls right — and making the case for them upward, clearly and without drama — is the job. 🚀 The work itself You'd lead the team, not the codebase. That means real 1:1s that help people grow, roadmap planning with product and engineering leadership, and clearing obstacles before the team hits them. You'd stay off the critical path for delivery — deliberately — while staying close enough to review changes, weigh in on technical plans, and roll your sleeves up when the team is stretched. You'd own the risk conversations in both directions: helping the team prioritise, and giving executives an honest picture when requirements and deadlines don't match reality. And you'd hand the team genuine ownership of design and implementation, because you know that's when morale, speed, and quality all move together. ✨ The person we're picturing You've led platform or SRE teams before — real production systems at scale, with on-call, compliance, and vendor relationships attached. You know this work from the inside, having done it as an engineer yourself. You default to trust. You delegate decisions to the pe