Escalations Engineer - Pipelines

About Buildkite

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 able to scale to the needs of the most demanding high-growth tech companies globally including Uber, Airbnb, Shopify, Canva, PagerDuty, Lyft, and Pinterest.

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 engineers who are based in the AU/NZ region.

Job Overview

In this role, you'll own the engineering response to the hardest problems our customers run into. You'll work inside the Pipelines team — partnering closely with Support, TAMs, and Solutions Architects — to take escalations from symptom to root cause, ship fixes back into the product, and remove the underlying causes of recurring tickets.

This is a deliberately different role from the traditional support engineering hamster wheel. We're not looking for someone to just clear tickets faster. We're looking for someone to own the space — to spot patterns, drive systemic fixes, and make Buildkite stickier and more reliable for the customers who depend on it most.

🚀 What You'll Do

• Own L3 escalations end-to-end — from symptom through diagnosis to a shipped fix
• Work in our Ruby on Rails monolith and PostgreSQL databases to resolve issues at the source
• Spot recurring patterns in support load and ship product changes that eliminate the underlying cause — the best support ticket is the one that never gets opened
• Partner with Support, TAMs, and Solutions Architects on technical diagnostics for high-impact customers
• Lead the engineering side of incident response when production issues require deeper investigation
• Help improve the onboarding and migration experience for customers moving onto Buildkite from other CI/CD platforms
• Take customer wins from intake to delivery — own them, follow through, don't drop the ball
• Contribute to architectural discussions on platform reliability and customer experience
• Provide or respond to feedback on GitHub pull requests

🎨 What You Bring

• 5+ years of experience in engineering
• Comfortable working in a Ruby on Rails monolith — able to read, debug, and modify production code confidently
• A track record of taking problems from symptom to root cause without losing focus or scope
• Pattern recognition — you see recurring issues and propose systemic fixes rather than one-off patches
• Comfortable in customer-facing conversations when escalations require it — can triage in real time, communicate clearly, and give customers confidence they're in the right hands
• Comfortable with performance at scale — N+1 queries, indexing strategies, diagnosing slow paths
• Experience using observability tools like Datadog, Honeycomb, etc.
• Care about code quality and know how to balance perfect with practical
• Calm and consistent under high volume — finish what you start
• Understand good development practices: clear commits, thoughtful pull requests, and reliable tests with tools like RSpec

Key Technical Stacks & Components:

• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• GraphQL
• React
• Datadog
• Amazon ECS
• RDS Performance Insights
• Terraform
• Redis
• Kafka

✨ Why Join Buildkite

At Buildkite, we value kindness, autonomy, and collaboration. You'll be part of a remote-first company where your work can make a meaningful impact – empowering engineers worldwide to build and deliver better software faster.

• Competitive compensation and benefits package
• Flexible, remote-first culture
• Opportunities for professional growth, leadership, and technical ownership
• Work alongside talented, passionate engineers building world-class developer tools
• A collaborative, inclusive, and innovative culture where your ideas make a real impact

 

🌈 Equal Opportunity Employer

At Buildkite, we value diversity and celebrate all types of skills, backgrounds, and experiences. We’re dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment and providing reasonable accommodations throughout our recruitment process.

If you need any accommodations or support during the application or interview process, please reach out to us at accommodations@buildkite.com.