Senior Community Engineer

Buildkite is a company focused on improving software delivery for developers. They are seeking a Senior Community Engineer to enhance customer trust and community engagement through technical expertise and storytelling.

Responsibilities:

• Ship production-grade reference implementations that show what “good” looks like with Buildkite
• Build and maintain tools and plugins that solve real problems and raise the ecosystem bar
• Respect public artifacts: versioned, documented, tested, and maintained with care
• Show up with the distinct Buildkite point-of-view: what we believe about CI, dev workflows, reliability, craft and the future
• Create moments that make Buildkite feel alive: sandboxes, immersive customer war stories, high-signal posts, hot takes with receipts, walkthroughs, behind-the-scenes builds, live demos, event moments, and community rituals that developers actually want to be part of
• Show up consistently and visibly: you are part of our brand. You’re comfortable being known, being quoted, and occasionally being wrong in public
• Engage where CI conversations happen and earn trust by being technically precise, calm, and genuinely useful
• Triage messy edge cases with customers and the community
• Build tight loops with our world-class Prod/Eng/Support teams; what’s breaking, what’s confusing, what’s missing, and what we’re going to do about it
• Turn real customer work into credible proof to show how the best engineering teams in the world utilise Buildkite
• Capture the raw material that makes stories compelling and believable
• Co-create with customers and champions; help them tell the story well without sanding off reality
• Identify and nurture champions; maintainers, power users, repeat contributors, and future speakers, geared as a durable learning and trust engine
• Design community pathways; how a curious engineer becomes a user→becomes a confident practitioner→becomes a public advocate; and, what we need to ship to support that journey
• Build loop: a steady drumbeat of shipping that reduces adoption friction
• Signal loop: structured capture of community/customer pain→categorisation→routing→action with clear ownership
• Proof loop: repeatable customer storytelling pipeline from discovery→capture→technical review→publish→distribution
• Culture loop: consistent personality, rituals, and moments that grow FOMO and the cult of Buildkite
• Trust loop: simple, clear measurement reporting that proves we’re progressively earning trust
• Speak, demo, and teach in formats engineers respect: talks, workshops, livestreams, meetups, and events (some travel in NA is necessary for this role)
• Build relationships with maintainers and tool builders across the CI/CD ecosystem — the people who shape what “good” becomes next

Requirements:

• Engineering background and CI fluency; you've shipped and operated production systems, and you have the hunger to define a new system
• Strong debugging + systems thinking; you can take a messy, multi-factor failure, reduce it to something actionable and translate that into a durable open asset
• Public-facing instinct; you're comfortable being a recognisable voice. You don't need to be loud, but you do need to be present
• Taste and judgment; you know the difference between “content” and “proof.” You protect trust and avoid anything that feels hollow, spammy, or inauthentic
• Clear technical communication; you write and explain with precision and empathy, speaking with rather than speaking at
• High-agency collaboration; you partner tightly with Prod/Eng/Support/Brand while owning outcomes cross-functionally
• Comfort working async in a high-trust environment where you own problems end-to-end
• You've built/maintained CI platforms, developer tooling, plugins, or infra at scale
• Public technical proof: OSS contributions, plugins, talks, deep technical writing, credible demos and or a track record of being a trusted voice in communities
• Experience shaping dev-facing narrative; turning messy reality into clear, useful, technically honest storytelling
• Experience handling logistics for meetups, workshops, office hours, or community programs where trust and belonging are the output, whether for orgs or for communities
• Familiarity with devtool dynamics; credibility loops, ecosystems, champions, and product-centric growth in technical markets