At Buildkite, our mission is to unblock every developer on the planet. We’ve rethought how software delivery should work and have built a platform that is fast, reliable, secure, and is able to scale to the needs of the most demanding high-growth tech companies including Shopify, Uber, Pinterest, Wayfair, Cruise, PagerDuty, Culture Amp, and Canva.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to join our Platform team, and scale our Postgres-powered Rails monolith running on AWS Fargate. Our Platform team is continuously improving our own deploy tools and dogfooding new features to safely deploy multiple times per day. Platform supports the product engineering teams with shared patterns, tooling and processes to help deliver great software products.

As their Engineering Manager you will manage and lead the engineers on that team, facilitate delivery of work, and partner with Product Managers and Engineering Leadership to deliver groundbreaking development tools already proving their value. You may spend time working directly with customers, engineers and stakeholders to collaborate, plan and deliver changes that meaningfully improve how our customers ship software.

Buildkite is an engineering company built by engineers for engineers, a manager in Buildkite needs to reflect this by being both technical and hands-on with deep experience. While your time on the tools (Terraform, Rails, Go, bash scripting) should never be on the critical path for project delivery, our engineering managers are drawn to anything that unblocks and helps the team deliver. We understand that helping your team best sometimes involves rolling your sleeves up, understanding deeply and getting your hands dirty.

What a typical day might look like:

• Holding 1:1s with team members to understand their motivations and interests, helping them deliver creative solutions and grow their careers.
• Identifying and driving improvements in processes, team dynamics, the development cycle, or anything that could increase team health, psychological safety, and delivery velocity.
• Collaborating with other Engineering Managers, Product Managers and the Engineering Leadership team to figure out what the team will be working on next, plan for it, and energise the team around goals, vision and strategy.
• Joining customer calls to hear about the problems they have and help propose ways the team can solve them
• Writing long form messages that capture team direction and point in time decision making with full context to keep your fully remote team aligned and working towards the same goals.
• Meeting with other engineering teams and leadership to align on work in similar areas and make cross-department impact.
• Managing key vendor relationships by evaluating usage and plans and making recommendations.
• Evaluating and communicating tradeoffs, prioritising, listening, unblock others, making final decisions, and having fun.
• Reviewing PR’s, providing feedback on technical plans, and writing small, isolated PR’s that unblock or accelerate the team in a meaningful way.

Skills and experience we like:

• Excellent communication and people skills.
• Previous experience in people leadership (including servant leadership), line management, facilitation, and mentoring of a small to medium team.
• An ability to break down projects and work with the team to deliver.
• A continuous improvement and growth mindset.
• Strong previous experience in Platform / SRE related work as an individual contributor working on a large scale application to deliver reliability, adaptability and security.
• Some experience with Terraform, ruby, ruby on rails, and monolithic applications running in containers on AWS would be beneficial.
• Some experience with maintaining compliant infrastructure, SOC2 in particular, would be beneficial.
• Excellent attention to detail, organisational and time management skills. As a startup, Buildkite can be hectic at times but having those skills it'll be very easy for you and your team to keep a great work/life balance.
• Experience in coordinating and facilitating healthy on-call structures and understanding the importance of learning from incidents.
• Experience in third-party vendor communication and coordination skills along with experience driving initiatives among multiple providers. Particular experience with AWS cost structures, methods, and discounting tools is a bonus.
• Some experience using at least one CI product (Buildkite or otherwise) and familiarity with patterns for increasing the safety of deploys, like smoke tests, canaries, and blue/green deploys would be helpful here. We value managers who have a deep understanding of the technical and product work of the team, and are able to present respected technical and product opinions.
• You share and are passionate about our values, and will ensure they guide the team and your own actions and behaviours.