Lachlan Donald
Chief Technology Officer at Buildkite
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLachlan Donald is a veteran technology leader and startup founder with over 17 years building product-led engineering organisations and scalable developer tooling from Melbourne. As a founding CTO at 99designs and co-founder/CEO/COO at Buildkite, he has hands-on experience scaling teams and products to millions in ARR, raising venture capital, and standing up enterprise sales and security programs. He blends deep engineering craft—contributions to Go-based Buildkite agents, CI/CD tooling, and open-source projects like aws-vault—with executive experience as CTO, VP engineering, and advisor across startups and growth-stage companies. Equally comfortable in the codebase or the boardroom, he focuses on developer productivity, resilient cloud infrastructure, and strong engineering culture. Outside of work he’s an avid llama and whisky enthusiast, a nod to a curious, practical approach to tooling and team building.
17 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc. (Hons 1st Class) Computer Science, B.Sc. (Hons 1st Class) Computer Science at RMIT University
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (35)
markdown10
docker10
buildkite10
testing10
command-line-interface10
process-management10
bash10
docker-compose10
dockers10
cicd10
phpunit10
api-documentation10
php10
aws-cloudformation10
go10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
buildkite-plugins/docker-compose-buildkite-plugin
Nov 2016 - Nov 2019
🐳⚡️ Run build scripts, and build + push images, w/ Docker Compose
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:11 releases, 277 commits, 127 PRs in 3 years
Contributions summary:Lachlan primarily contributed to the Buildkite plugin by improving the build and run process. Their work involved modifying build scripts, fixing undefined variables, and correcting the order of build arguments. They also added new tests, fixed bugs related to volume cleanup and image names and integrated a push operation. The user also focused on enhancing the logging and debugging capabilities, including showing more output and providing artifact uploading.
dockerfilepushdocker-imagedockercompose
buildkite/agent
Apr 2017 - Jun 2022
The Buildkite Agent is an open-source toolkit written in Go for securely running build jobs on any device or network
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:57 releases, 6 reviews, 1231 commits in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Lachlan primarily focused on refactoring and improving the Buildkite Agent's signal handling mechanisms. They addressed signal propagation issues in the Go bootstrap, implemented robust handling of various signals, and optimized the process of terminating child processes. They also made contributions to the Buildkite Agent CLI, by adding support for processing a configurable shell.
continuous-deploymentgolangbuild-jobsjobsenvironments
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