Keith Pitt

Keith created Buildkite’s original platform and shaped an architecture that lets teams coordinate automated builds and tests while retaining control of the machines running them. Organisations including Shopify, Canva and Airbnb use Buildkite. Shopify’s account shows why this flexibility matters: its engineers could add monitoring and customise infrastructure to support work on faster, scalable automated checks.

Keith Pitt is the founder of Unreasonable Magic and co-founder of Buildkite, having built Buildkite's original platform in 2013. Based in Melbourne, Keith previously built and sold Desktoppr and held lead engineering roles at Envato and Qantas. Leading Buildkite as chief executive, Keith guided the platform from early product development through to shaping company culture and product direction, before stepping down in February 2025 to found Unreasonable Magic.

At Buildkite, Keith introduced a distinctive hybrid architecture for continuous integration. The platform coordinates pipelines in the cloud while dispatching jobs to agents hosted on customer-controlled infrastructure, giving engineering teams direct control over their testing environments, security boundaries and compute scaling.

This setup provides substantial practical advantages for large-scale test pipelines, enabling organisations such as Shopify to execute massive test suites on custom cloud infrastructure alongside detailed performance monitoring. Under Keith's leadership, Buildkite expanded its tooling for quality engineering further with the release of Test Analytics in 2021.