IT Engineer

About Buildkite

Buildkite's mission is to unblock every developer on the planet. Our CI/CD platform is the infrastructure that teams at Uber, OpenAI, Shopify, Airbnb, and Canva rely on to ship software at scale. Not as a convenience tool — as critical infrastructure. The kind that can't go down.

We've been remote-first since 2013 — distributed across 60+ cities, built around async communication and genuine autonomy. Small team. High standards. Real ownership.

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The Role

Buildkite's IT team is currently one person. This hire changes that.

We're not looking for someone to take tickets and provision devices. We're looking for someone who treats IT as an engineering problem — who automates instead of accepting manual work, builds systems instead of patching them, and documents as they go rather than as an afterthought.

The split today is roughly 60% operational support and 40% engineering, and that ratio will shift as you ramp. Support covers devices, SaaS administration, access management, and troubleshooting. The engineering side is where the strategic work lives: automated access provisioning, device trust and compliance, IaC for SaaS configuration management, API integrations. These aren't future promises — they're the active priorities.

You'll report directly to the IT Manager and work closely with Security, Platform Engineering, and People Ops.

There's no legacy process to inherit and no bureaucracy to navigate — but that also means there's no established playbook. You'll be building a lot of this from scratch, with the autonomy to shape how it works.

Your internal customers are engineers who care about good tooling and will absolutely notice the difference between something well-built and something bolted together. That raises the bar — in the best way.

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What You'll Do

• Own day-to-day operational support: devices, SaaS admin, access management, and troubleshooting across a globally distributed team
• Build and maintain automation for access provisioning, onboarding, offboarding, and common support workflows
• Contribute to IaC using Terraform or similar tooling for SaaS configuration management
• Design and build API and webhook integrations across our internal tooling stack
• Mature device trust, compliance tooling, and endpoint management
• Collaborate with Security, Platform Engineering, and People Ops on projects that span team boundaries
• Document as you work — not as a separate task at the end

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A Typical Week

Monday morning: troubleshoot an access issue in Slack. Afternoon: review a PR for the automation you've been building. Tuesday: provision a device, then spend a focused block writing Terraform or wiring up an API integration. You'll context-switch between reactive support and focused engineering work, often in the same day. Both sides of the role are real from day one.

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What Success Looks Like

First 90 Days

• Handling support independently with confidence
• Familiar with our key configs, policies, and vendor relationships
• Starting to pick up and contribute to smaller engineering tasks

6 Months

• Independent across all BAU support
• Shipped at least one meaningful automation or tooling improvement
• Contributing to engineering projects and beginning to own specific workstreams

1 Year

• Owns support with minimal oversight
• Contributing to multiple engineering projects
• Comfortable scoping small-to-medium work independently
• The split has shifted closer to 50/50
• The team is delivering measurably more than one person ever could

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What We're Looking For

Non-Negotiable

• macOS device management and MDM experience
• SaaS platform administration and identity provider management
• SSO, SAML, and SCIM configuration and troubleshooting
• Strong written communication for async, remote-first work
• Access lifecycle management: onboarding and offboarding experience
• Scripting ability — you've actually built things, not just patched them

Nice to Have

• API and webhook integration experience
• Comfort with AI-assisted development workflows
• IaC experience (Terraform or similar)
• Endpoint management and compliance tooling
• Background at a developer-tooling or engineering-focused company

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Why Buildkite

• You're not maintaining someone else's setup — you're building the function from scratch
• The engineering component is core to the role from day one, not something you earn later
• Your internal customers are engineers at a developer tools company — they care about good work
• Remote-first since 2013. No pandemic retrofit. Async culture, real flexibility
• Competitive compensation including salary, equity, and benefits