Staff Security Engineer

About Buildkite

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 Airbnb, Shopify, Canva, PagerDuty, Lyft, and Pinterest.

Job Overview

We’re looking for a Staff Security Engineer to help shape and scale security across Buildkite’s platform, infrastructure, and developer workflows.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll drive security architecture, influence engineering standards, and help embed secure-by-default thinking into how we build and ship software. You’ll operate across Application Security, Adversarial Security, and Cloud & Platform Security - setting technical direction while remaining close to implementation.

Staff Engineers at Buildkite are force multipliers. In this role, you’ll raise the security bar across the organisation, partner deeply with Engineering and Product leaders, and design security systems that scale with our growth.

🔧 About the Security Team

The Security team at Buildkite designs secure-by-default infrastructure, developer workflows, and data protection systems. We work closely with Engineering, Platform, and Product to reduce risk without slowing delivery.

As a small, high-impact team in a fast-growing company, we focus on:

Embedding security into the SDLC and CI/CD workflows

Proactively identifying and validating risks through adversarial testing

Designing cloud and infrastructure controls that scale

Building guardrails and automation that make the secure path the easiest path

Ensuring that AI is a key part of our evolution

This role will help define the next stage of maturity for security at Buildkite.

🚀 What You’ll Do

Build and Improve Security Across the Platform

Lead threat modeling and architectural security reviews for all parts of the organisation

Conduct Adversary Simulations and Penetrations Tests against key parts of the Application and business (attack simulation, exploit validation, abuse-case testing)

Drive the technical strategy for Application Security, adversarial testing, and cloud security

Design scalable security guardrails across CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and developer tooling

Improve vulnerability discovery, triage, remediation workflows, and ownership models

Strengthen supply chain and dependency security across build systems and artifacts

Design security controls that are embedded into product and infrastructure

Lead and Unblock at the Org Level

Act as a trusted security partner to engineering leaders and senior ICs

Drive alignment on security trade-offs across product velocity, reliability, and risk

Lead high-impact security initiatives end-to-end (discovery → prioritisation → implementation → rollout)

Shape incident readiness, detection improvements, and post-incident hardening

Mentor engineers to elevate secure design and implementation practices

Contribute to cross-team technical direction beyond immediate security scope when needed

Raise the Bar Through Systems Thinking

Identify structural risks and design long-term solutions rather than point fixes

Introduce automation, tooling, and policy-as-code to reduce recurring classes of issues

Improve how we measure security posture and communicate risk at leadership levels

Ensure security scales with Buildkite’s infrastructure, customer growth, and product expansion

🎨 Skills & Experience We Value

Deep Security Expertise

7+ years of experience in security engineering, with strong depth in application security and adversarial testing 

Extensive knowledge of common web and API vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10 and beyond) and practical remediation patterns

Experience designing and reviewing secure architectures for distributed systems

Hands-on adversarial security experience (offensive testing, exploit validation, abuse-case modeling, red teaming)

Strong understanding of cloud security fundamentals, ideally in AWS environment

Platform & Infrastructure Experience

Experience securing CI/CD pipelines and modern developer platforms

Familiarity with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code systems

Experience working with Kubernetes security patterns and workload controls

Strong understanding of identity, secrets management, and access control systems

Comfortable reading and writing production code (Ruby, Go, or similar)

✨ Why Join Buildkite

At Buildkite, we value kindness, autonomy, and collaboration. You’ll be joining a remote-first company where your work directly helps some of the world’s best engineering teams build and ship software faster and more safely.

Competitive compensation, including salary, equity, and benefits package

Flexible, remote-first culture

Meaningful technical challenges at scale

Opportunities for professional growth and company-wide technical influence

A collaborative, inclusive, and innovative culture where your ideas make a real impact

🌈 Equal Opportunity Employer

At Buildkite, we value diversity and celebrate all types of skills, backgrounds, and experiences. We’re dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment and providing reasonable accommodations throughout our recruitment process.

If you need any accommodations or support during the application or interview process, please reach out to us at accommodations@buildkite.com.