Buildkite, a leader in scalable software delivery solutions, announced on August 5, 2025, the appointment of Kevin Gounden as Chief Executive Officer, succeeding founder Keith Pitt, who stepped down in March 2025. Gounden joins a revamped leadership team, including Chief Technology Officer James Wilson, Chief Marketing Officer Jay Wampold, and Chief Financial Officer Francine Hackett, to drive AI-enabled innovation and global expansion.
CEO Appointment: Kevin Gounden, former Chief Product Officer at Lightcast and Randstad, named CEO.
Leadership Team: New hires include CTO James Wilson (ex-Apple, AWS), CMO Jay Wampold (ex-AWS, Chef Software), and CFO Francine Hackett (ex-Pearson, Randstad).
Customer Base: Serves over 1 billion daily users via clients like Airbnb, Canva, Shopify, Slack, Uber, and Reddit.
Funding: Raised $31M Series B in 2022 at a $200M valuation, led by OneVentures and AirTree.
Technology: Scale-Out Delivery Platform for CI/CD, supporting AI/ML and mobile app development.
Recent Milestone: Reddit’s migration to Buildkite cut build times by 30%, per August 2025 announcement.
Gounden, with over 20 years of experience leading SaaS ventures and product organizations, previously drove innovation at Lightcast and Randstad across 70+ countries. “I’m extremely excited to be joining Buildkite at such a pivotal moment,” said Gounden. “Buildkite’s software delivery platform has become the gold standard for the world’s top companies.” Board Chair Barry Crist, who served as interim CEO, praised Gounden’s “technology vision, long-proven SaaS product execution, and customer-centric leadership.”
The leadership team includes:
James Wilson (CTO): Joined February 2025, with experience at Apple, AWS, and WooliesX, leading iOS development and ML-driven network monitoring.
Jay Wampold (CMO): Joined February 2024, known for creating the “FinOps” category at Cloudability and popularizing DevOps at Chef Software.
Francine Hackett (CFO): Joined December 2024, with expertise in M&A and digital finance from Tractor Ventures and Pearson.
“We welcome Kevin, James, Jay, and Francine at a time when the board has never been more confident about Buildkite’s future,” said Crist.
Buildkite’s Scale-Out Delivery Platform, launched in October 2024, supports up to 10,000 self-hosted agents, enabling secure, scalable CI/CD for AI/ML and mobile app development. Companies like Airbnb, Shopify, Slack, and Reddit rely on Buildkite, with Reddit reporting a 30% reduction in build times after migrating mobile CI/CD pipelines in 2025. The platform’s hybrid model, combining cloud orchestration with self-hosted agents, ensures security and flexibility, serving over 1 billion daily users.
Founded in 2013 by Keith Pitt, Buildkite raised $31M in 2022, following a $28M round in 2020, valuing the company at $200M. Its acquisition of PackageCloud in 2023 enhanced software distribution capabilities. The company’s focus on AI-enabled delivery aligns with the global CI/CD market’s projected 20% CAGR through 2030, driven by AI and DevOps adoption.
Based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Buildkite is a fast-growing software delivery provider that offers the industry’s first and only agentic CI/CD platform. Buildkite's platform is the only solution that provides the flexibility and scale required by the world's most demanding companies for delivering software across a broad range of use cases, including AI/ML workloads and mobile application development. Global innovation leaders, including Airbnb, Block, Canva, Cruise, Culture Amp, Elastic, Lyft, PagerDuty, Pinterest, PlanetScale, Rippling, Shopify, Slack, Tinder, Twilio, Uber, and Wayfair, have standardized on Buildkite for software delivery.
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