Staff Software Engineer, Validate — Buildkite (Remote AU/NZ)
First seen by Alion on Sep 24, 2026.
Buildkite runs the CI platform behind a huge chunk of the software you use every day. Anthropic, OpenAI, Uber, Airbnb, NVIDIA, Meta, Shopify, Canva and Tinder all ship through it. About 1.5 billion jobs run through the platform in a given month. We’re with them to hire two Staff Software Engineers onto Validate, the team that owns test intelligence: real-time flaky test detection, quarantining, intelligent test splitting, and the analytics underneath it all. Agents are now writing a serious share of the world’s code, and they write tests faster than any team can reason about them, so the question has shifted from “did the build pass” to “can I trust this change, and what do I do about it right now.” Increasingly that answer needs to be actionable by an agent, not just readable by a person. That’s the problem this team solves.
What you’d be doing
Owning backend systems that ingest and query test events at very high concurrency, from some of the largest test suites in the world. Making the real data and storage calls (schema, partitioning, what belongs in Postgres versus a columnar store) and being accountable for how they hold up under real customer load. Taking ideas from rough prototype through to something customers depend on, and working directly with customer DevEx teams along the way.
What you’ll need
- Strong backend engineering, with Ruby or Go
- Real depth in Postgres at scale - query performance, indexing, partitioning, knowing when the relational answer stops being the right one
- Bonus if you’ve worked with high-throughput streaming data - Kafka, ClickHouse, Flink
- The ability to talk concretely about concurrency, throughput and API load you’ve dealt with, and what broke first
- Comfortable owning ambiguous problems end to end with very little process around you
Culture
High agency and low process. The rhythm is take an idea to a rough prototype, get it to about 70%, demo it at stand-up, get your thinking stress-tested, then ship it and own it. Staff engineers here work across team boundaries and end up on customer calls with DevEx teams at places like Uber and Anthropic.
Details
100% remote in Australia or New Zealand