Escalations Engineer - Pipelines

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...

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.

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 cause...

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

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