Staff Engineer - Releases

Buildkite’s CI platform is trusted by the world’s leading engineering teams, shipping software to over 1,000,000,000 daily users. Job Overview We're looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Releases team. In this role, you'll help solve some of the most challenging technical problems we face as we continue to scale Buildkite's platform. You'll drive architectural decisions, lead technical strategy, and work closely with engineers, designers, and product managers to deliver impactful improvements. Staff Engineers at Buildkite are hands-on technical leaders. You'll influence how we design, build, and scale systems while supporting other engineers to deliver their best work. 🔧 About the Team The Releases team is building Buildkite's release control plane — a foundational layer that gives platform teams one trusted, auditable view of what shipped, where, and whether it met governance requirements. Our initial focus is designing a canonical release model (service, environment, commit, artefact, actor, status), reliable ingestion from Pipelines and GitHub Deployments, and an immutable evidence trail that powers policy gates and DORA metrics. Beyond that foundation, the same platform becomes a progressive delivery product: staged rollouts, canary analysis, blue/green deploys, health-based promotion, and automatic rollback. In short, we're moving from observing and governing releases to orchestrating and optimising them — integrating cleanly with existing CD systems rather than forcing a full replacement. 🚀 What You’ll Do Own Technical Direction for the Releases Platform Design the release architecture and core data model, including the canonical release entity and its relationships across services, environments, artefacts, and actors Lead key technical decisions around security, reliability, and scale — particularly for the immutable evidence trail and policy gate infrastructure Drive the hardest cross-system integrations, including ingestion from Pipelines and GitHub De