Buildkite
CI/CD
VPofProductEngineering
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Director candidates.
“VP of Product Engineering at Buildkite. Skills: Leading product engineering organisations through scaling, Technical credibility, Quantitative operating style, Clear communication. Lead the teams building the products our customers depend on every day — Pipelines, Test Engine, Packages, Agents. Product engineering delivery”
What You'll Achieve.
Ships software to over a billion daily users; Workloads on the platform have doubled in the last three months; Customers are asking us to support 5–10x workload growth this year; Velocity, quality, and reliability across all five product teams; Upholding a high bar for technical excellence, decision-making, and shipped outcomes; Setting credible, ambitious targets for delivery performance; Surface capability gaps and deliberate bets before they become problems; Operational excellence for product surfaces; Reliability, performance, and incident response for customer-facing surfaces; Systematic reduction of product-related incidents and repeat root causes
Industry & Context.
Gnarly problems, not abstractions; Migrating, rollouts, reversibility, and live operations are real engineering problems with real consequences; Systematic reduction of product-related incidents and repeat root causes
Based in AU/NZ and US Pacific time zones, Sustainable on-call rotations across AU/NZ and US Pacific
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
Proven experience leading product engineering organisations through meaningful scaling, Managing managers, Developing staff-level ICs, Owning delivery across multiple product lines concurrently, A hands-on engineering background sufficient to earn trust from senior engineers and make sound architectural calls, Read production code fluently and challenge technical decisions on merit, Quantitative approach using data to set targets, surface risk, and measure engineering performance, Clear written and verbal communicator able to drive decisions with urgency, Comfortable leading a distributed team across AU/NZ and US Pacific
Nice to Have
Experience leading teams building developer tools, CI/CD, infrastructure products, or similarly technical B2B products, References ready to speak to your coaching and sponsorship, Track record of delivering outsized results with small teams through sharp prioritisation and leverage, Opinions on what separates a high-performing product engineering organisation from a merely busy one
What You'll Do.
Lead the teams building the products our customers depend on every day — Pipelines
Product engineering delivery
Setting and upholding a high bar for technical excellence
Benchmarking delivery performance against comparable product engineering organisations and setting credible
Coaching the EMs in building high-performing teams
Growing Staff and Principal engineers into broader influence
Developing the next generation of EMs from within
Partnering with Talent and People on staffing plans
Translating product strategy into delivery reality
Driving the hardest trade-offs between scope
Making engineering constraints legible to product
and executive stakeholders
Making product strategy legible back to engineers
Architectural consistency across product teams
Build/partner decisions across the product portfolio
AI-augmented engineering practices to maximise the leverage of small
and incident response for customer-facing surfaces
Sustainable on-call rotations across AU/NZ and US Pacific
Engineering's voice to the business and to customers
Direct engagement with enterprise customers on roadmap
and reliability conversations
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Partnering with Talent and People on staffing plans; Product-engineering partnership; Making engineering constraints legible to product, commercial, and executive stakeholders; Making product strategy legible back to engineers; Engineering's voice to the business and to customers; Direct engagement with enterprise customers on roadmap, architecture, and reliability conversations
Communication Scope
Clear written and verbal communicator; Able to drive decisions with urgency without resorting to theatre; Engineering's voice to the business and to customers; Trusted technical voice to the executive team; Direct engagement with enterprise customers on roadmap, architecture, and reliability conversations
Process & Methodology
Owning delivery across multiple product lines concurrently, Sharp prioritisation
Full Job Description
About Buildkite Buildkite's CI/CD platform is trusted by the world's leading engineering teams — Uber, OpenAI, Shopify, Airbnb, Canva, Pinterest — and ships software to over a billion daily users. We've been remote-first since 2013, and around 75% of the company has an engineering background. We're at a massive inflection point. Workloads on the platform have doubled in the last three months on an already large base, and customers are asking us to support 5–10x workload growth this year. We're shifting from incremental progress to making bigger bets while scaling the platform underneath. Our engineering teams work across AU/NZ and US Pacific time zones — a deliberate choice that lets us move fast with real-time collaboration. At the moment, we are prioritising candidates who are based in these regions. The role; We're hiring a VP of Product Engineering to lead the teams building the products our customers depend on every day — Pipelines, Test Engine, Packages, Agents The combination of things going on here doesn't come up often: Gnarly problems, not abstractions. Buildkite runs continuously, can't be paused, and experiences partial failure as a normal operating condition. The systems carry stateful guarantees for the companies pushing the most code in the world. Migrations, rollouts, reversibility, and live operations are real engineering problems with real consequences. Scale that's already real, before you start. Software shipped through Buildkite reaches over a billion daily users. The customer list — Uber, OpenAI, Shopify, Airbnb, Canva, Pinterest, and most of the frontier AI labs — sets the bar for "scale" externally, not internally. You don't have to argue for why your work matters. Five product teams, one mandate. Pipelines, Test Engine, Packages, Agents Product engineering delivery. Velocity, quality, and reliability across all five product teams. Setting and upholding a high bar for technical excellence, decision-making, and shipped outcomes. Benchmarking d
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