Lachlan Donald

Lachlan helped create Buildkite and now provides technical leadership for a platform used by engineering teams including Shopify. Its customer-controlled testing infrastructure lets teams adapt automated checks to demanding workloads. Shopify’s published experience shows how that flexibility supported measurement and faster testing, making Buildkite a practical contribution to the systems developers rely on to check software changes.

Lachlan Donald is Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Buildkite, guiding the infrastructure engineering teams rely on to build, test and deliver software at scale. Based in Victoria’s Alpine Region, Lachlan brings more than two decades of experience in developer tools and systems architecture. Earlier career milestones include co-founding 99designs as founding CTO, followed by senior engineering roles at Block and Groq leading cloud platform and software delivery infrastructure strategy.

After six years building at Groq, PatientNotes and Block/Cash App, Lachlan returned to Buildkite to steer technical direction. The platform enables teams to run continuous integration pipelines on customer-controlled infrastructure, offering the flexibility to scale capacity dynamically and tailor how workloads run. Engineering organisations such as Shopify have used Buildkite to embed detailed performance instrumentation and accelerate test execution, reinforcing software quality through fast, reliable automated feedback loops.