Staff Engineer - DevX

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead Developer Experience at Buildkite, building the compounding, AI-led development loops that lifts the productivity of all our engineers. We have a plan to double R&D output per engineer over the next 12 months across a team of around 80 engineers, and this is the role we've created to make that happen. You'll be the person leading it, looking holistically at how software gets shipped here — CI, build tooling, the codebase itself, deployment paths, and how we work with agentic coding tools; and steadily removing everything that slows us down. Here your work compounds twice. Everything you build to make our engineers faster lands inside a product that engineering teams around the world use to ship, so the change that wins our team back an hour a day doesn't stop with us — it becomes something our customers get too. Very few developer experience roles let you fix a problem once and have it show up in the industry. And if you'd rather fix the pipeline than give the conference talk about it, this is the right seat. This is internal work: the systems our own engineers live in every day, not developer advocacy or external DevEx. Your audience is the engineer whose build you just made two minutes faster, and they will tell you straight away whether it worked. This is a fully remote role, open to candidates based in Australia, New Zealand or USA (West Coast only at this stage). 🚀 What You'll Do Own the end-to-end developer experience for around 80 engineers, spanning CI, build tooling, codebase health, deployment paths, and the AI-assisted development loop Lead our goal of doubling R&D output per engineer, which includes working out what "faster" genuinely means and finding measures that hold up rather than collapsing into a leaderboard for whoever ships the most mediocre code Stay hands-on and ship the work yourself, landing real PRs across languages and services you may never have touched before, and making low-risk, high