Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

About Buildkite

Buildkite's CI platform is trusted by the world's leading engineering teams, helping ship software used by more than 1 billion people every day. Companies including Canva, Meta, Mistral AI, and NVIDIA rely on Buildkite to run builds, tests, and deployments on their infrastructure, ours, or both - giving them the speed, reliability, and flexibility to ship with confidence.

About the Role

Our largest customers run CI/CD at frontier scale. AI is driving their build and test workloads up sharply, and more of these large, established companies want a partner to come in and build alongside them so they can grow and scale even faster.

As one of Buildkite's first Forward Deployed Engineers, you'll take on scoped engagements with strategic customers from design through delivery. Customers pay for an outcome: you work out what they actually need, agree on a clear deliverable, build it as production code, and land it in the platform. It's hands-on engineering with real customer access.

You'll spend time on site with the platform teams behind some of the most demanding CI workloads in the world, in the room with their engineers and executives, and you'll stay accountable until what you built works and is handed off. You'll also shape how it runs (how we scope, value, and hand off work) by actually implementing the first engagements, not by writing the playbook first.

You'll sit in our Revenue org alongside Solutions Architects and Technical Account Managers, close to customers and Sales, and work hand in hand with Product and our Engineering team in Australia. The role is based on the US West Coast, with regular travel to customer sites (around 25%).

What You'll Do

- Work through the customer's reality and scope engagements before the deal closes: partnering with Solution Architects and TAMs to dig into what stands between a customer and Buildkite, identifying true gaps. Spot patterns across customers and bring them back to Product so recurring workarounds become roadmap items.

- Turn true gaps into defined engagements: a clear deliverable, an estimate, and exit criteria that the customer and Buildkite both sign off on, then keep the work inside that scope as new asks come up.

- Build core platform features, held to the same bar (and using the same frontier tools) as our product engineers. Then hand off cleanly to Product and Engineering so what you build becomes a supported part of Buildkite, benefitting all customers.

- Help Solutions Architects and Account Executives recognize FDE opportunities in their deals and explain what FDE is (and isn't) in plain terms, especially as we build the role together through iteration on engagements.

This Is You If...

- You've shipped production software end to end in the last few years: code you owned and were accountable for, not just contributed to.

- You'd pass the same technical bar as our product engineers.

- You can translate a business need into a technical spec and back again, and you stay composed when a customer's executive is frustrated.