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. Buildkite has created the most scalable and reliable software delivery platform in the industry. Empowering customers to self-host agents with our renowned hybrid architecture, we seamlessly orchestrate millions of mission-critical Continuous Integration (CI) jobs daily across any operating system, any cloud, and any environment with unmatched precision.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the team shaping the future of Buildkite’s most exciting new products: Hosted Agents and Mobile Delivery Cloud (MDC).

Our latest product, Hosted Agents, combines the power of our self-hosted agent capabilities with the seamless efficiency and performance of a purpose-built managed solution, delivering faster builds with less effort.

Buildkite is an engineering company built by engineers for engineers, and a manager in Buildkite needs to reflect this by being both technical and hands-on with deep experience. While your time on the tools (Ruby, Rails, Go, Postgres, containers) 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.

As the Engineering Manager you will partner with the team’s Product Lead, manage and lead the engineers on the team, and facilitate delivery of work. You will spend time working directly with customers, engineers and stakeholders to collaborate, plan and deliver our hosted agents offering, and mobile development solutions that meaningfully improve how our customers build, test and release mobile apps.

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 the Product Lead to agree on 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.
• Meeting with other engineering teams to align on work in similar areas.
• Evaluating and communicating tradeoffs, prioritising, listening, unblocking 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.
• An ability to break down projects and work with the team to deliver.
• A continuous improvement and growth mindset.
• Solid experience using at least one CI product (Buildkite or otherwise). 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.
• Ideally, previous experience in people leadership (including servant leadership), line management, facilitation, and mentoring of a small to medium team.
• Some experience with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and monolithic applications would be beneficial.
• Some experience building iOS or Android apps would be beneficial, to help understand the problems our customers need solving.
• 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.
• You share and are passionate about our values, and will ensure they guide the team and your own actions and behaviours.