Senior Solutions Architect
Job description
About the role
Buildkite is looking for a Senior Solutions Architect to join their team and help customers succeed with their continuous integration and delivery platform. In this role, you will work closely with engineering teams and stakeholders to design solutions that meet complex build and deployment needs across a variety of industries and organizational sizes. You will serve as a technical trusted advisor, guiding organizations on how to get the most from Buildkite's infrastructure and tooling throughout their adoption journey. The position involves a blend of strategic planning and hands-on technical guidance across a wide range of customer engagements, from initial discovery sessions through long-term relationship management and ongoing optimization.
Key facts
What you'll do
Partner with customer engineering teams to understand their CI/CD pipeline requirements and identify key technical challenges they face today.
Design and present clear architectural recommendations that are tailored to each customer's specific build and release workflows.
Conduct in-depth technical discovery sessions to map out integration points between Buildkite and the customer's existing toolchain.
Create hands-on proof-of-concept implementations that demonstrate how Buildkite can effectively solve specific and real customer problems.
Collaborate closely with the product team to relay valuable customer feedback and prioritize feature requests for future releases.
Guide customers through established best practices for scaling their build infrastructure reliably across multiple projects and teams.
Develop comprehensive solution designs that address performance, reliability, and security considerations for continuous integration and delivery workloads.
Support sales and business development engagements by providing essential technical depth during customer presentations and product evaluations.
Document architectural decisions and reusable solution patterns that can be applied across similar customer accounts and use cases.
Mentor junior team members on solution design methodologies and effective customer-facing technical communication strategies and techniques.
Evaluate customer environments and recommend optimizations for build speed, agent configuration, and pipeline organization within Buildkite.
Represent Buildkite at industry events, conferences, and customer workshops to share knowledge and strengthen the product community.
Requirements
Demonstrated experience designing and delivering CI/CD solutions in a consulting or customer-facing technical role over several years.
Strong understanding of build systems, version control workflows, automated testing practices, and software release management fundamentals.
Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and confidently to both engineering teams and non-technical business stakeholders.
Hands-on experience working with cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure in production environments.
Proven track record of managing multiple customer engagements simultaneously while maintaining consistently high quality and strong relationships.
Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in computer science, software engineering, or a closely related technical discipline.
Comfort with traveling to customer sites or participating in on-site workshops and collaborative sessions when business needs require.
Several years of professional experience in a solutions architecture, pre-sales engineering, technical consulting, or a similar role.
Familiarity with modern DevOps practices including infrastructure automation, monitoring, and observability in large-scale distributed systems.
Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to produce clear technical documentation and presentation materials.
Nice to have
Familiarity with Buildkite's product features and existing customer use cases across the software development industry.
Experience contributing to open source projects related to continuous integration, delivery, or DevOps tooling and ecosystems.
Background in writing or presenting technical content such as blog posts, documentation, or conference talks and presentations.
Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code tools and configuration management systems commonly used in modern DevOps and platform teams.
Experience advising enterprise customers on migration strategies for moving legacy build systems to modern CI/CD platforms.
Understanding of security best practices for build pipelines including secrets management and access control policies and procedures.
Skills & tools
CI/CD pipeline design and implementation across diverse technology stacks, programming languages, and deployment target environments.
Cloud service platforms including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure with production experience.
Version control systems such as Git and associated branching strategies, merge workflows, and repository management practices.
Scripting and automation using languages like Python, Bash, or Go for build and deployment tasks.
Container technologies including Docker and container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes for managing build environments.
Technical presentation and documentation skills for clearly communicating architecture decisions to varied technical and business audiences.
Build agent configuration and management across different operating systems including Linux, macOS, and Windows environments.
Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools used to track build performance and pipeline health metrics over time.
Practical notes
This role is based in the United States West Coast region with a flexible work arrangement and hybrid scheduling options.
The position may require periodic travel to customer locations, industry conferences, or on-site workshops throughout the calendar year.
Buildkite offers a supportive work environment within the designated geographic region with emphasis on work-life balance and team collaboration.
The hiring process includes technical interviews, a practical solution design exercise, and cultural alignment conversations with the team.
Candidates should expect a thorough evaluation of their technical architecture skills and customer communication abilities during the interview rounds.
Buildkite is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from individuals with diverse backgrounds and perspectives across the technology sector.
About the company
Buildkite is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform used in DevOps and company was founded in September 2013. Companies using Buildkite include Wayfair, Shopify, Slack, Twilio, Canva, Pinterest, Envato, MYOB, Lyft and Uber.