Location: International, Anywhere; 100% Remote (timezones from East Asia to Northern Africa Preferred)
About Us
Buffer is a platform of social media products made for small businesses. We help our customers stand out online and drive meaningful engagement and measurable results for their brand and bottom line. Our mission is to provide essential tools to help small businesses get off the ground and grow. Through exceptional customer service and uplifting content, we help companies believe they can succeed and do good along the way.
Our Culture and Values
Clear communication, transparency, open-mindedness, empathy, and patience are just a few of Buffer’s cultural values. We are looking for a person who understands this culture and will thrive within a team of people passionate about self-improvement, honesty, and openness. Here’s a guide on how we strive to communicate with customers.
Working at Buffer is collaborative effort built on the foundation of our core values. We try to be “No Ego Doers” who are aware of our assumptions, and joining us means you’ll work together with the team in order to test and confirm our ideas. In our career framework, we choose to focus on the journey, the growth, and evolution that is a career.
We’re cultivating a unique and robust culture, and building a different type of company that’s focused not only on the bottom line, but also the happiness and personal growth of our customers and team along the journey.
Where You’ll Work
Buffer is a fully distributed team, which means that we’re spread across the planet. We have Bufferoos in 15 countries, 11 timezones, and 42 cities around the world to build a great culture and product.
We’re looking for an Engineering Manager for our infrastructure team. You’ll be supporting 4 engineers working on across DevOps, site reliability, security, infrastructure management, and overall developer workflow tooling. In this role, you’ll both manage the engineers as well as form the roadmap for our Infrastructure projects. You’ll work closely with Engineering Managers,
At Buffer, we value engineering managers who’re able to craft a fulfilling work environment for each engineer and lead effective teams where folks do their best work. We believe that a human centred leadership approach is key to a high performing team, and that these two go hand in hand.
Buffer is an equal opportunity employer that has the rare opportunity to add teammates from anywhere in the world. We are actively working to create an inclusive environment, and value diverse and non-traditional backgrounds. Our team is made up of developers who hail from startups to the theatre – we’re united by Buffer’s values, and we celebrate our unique differences.
The Infrastructure team’s mission is to provide a platform for delivery for all engineers at Buffer. Delivery is thought about in 3 key ways:
Delivery from engineer’s laptop to Github
Delivery of code from Github to testing, staging, and production environments
Delivery of the application itself to our users
All aspects of delivery should be done securely, reliably and confidently. This team’s impact is to allow our product engineers to efficiently write code and test it locally then take that code from our repositories(Github) to automated testing environments, staging environments, then automatically to production w/ CI/CD. We aspire to build a platform for self-serve DevOps for our product engineers. Applying this mentality, every change that the Infrastructure team makes has the ability to improve the workflows across the entire engineering team. The Infrastructure team is the key enabling team for our entire engineering team.
What You’ll Do
Lead engineering team(s) to deliver high quality software on predictable schedules, working to reduce cycle time and friction for your team.
Set the team’s roadmap aligned with the team’s mission, Buffer’s technical strategy, and the company strategy.
Gather context across the engineering organization to build a working understanding of the challenges and opportunities the engineering team is facing building and deploying software. Little of your time would be spent coding, but you will be expected to maintain context, ask informative questions, and assist the team in making strategic trade-offs.
Maintain relationships with key infrastructure vendors(e.g. Datadog, MongoDB) to understand ways to improve usage of third party tools, guide the team’s adoption, and handle yearly contract renewals.
Have regular one on ones with engineers, where you will:
Set expectations, provide regular feedback & hold team members accountable
Develop a strong two-way feedback loop where you share wider organizational context and build a deep understanding of each engineer and how they work
Support engineers and help reach a resolution when challenges arise
Craft a fulfilling and engaging work experience through regular career growth and development conversations
Manage the context in which team members operate, including:
Representing the team in planning meetings
Translating engineering team vision and technical road map into action
Coordinating with other areas such as Marketing and Customer Advocacy as needed
Iterate and improve our engineering processes and technical culture
Participate in hiring and on-boarding of engineers
Helpful Skills and Experience
You have a passion for DevOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure and know how much of a major impact a great platform team can have for the rest of engineering and therefore the company.
You have experience leading an engineering team, either as an engineering manager, a technical project manager or as a senior engineer/technical lead.
You have a technical background – engineering managers at Buffer have typically worked as senior engineers in their careers.
You’re capable of leading globally distributed team members who might have different skill sets from your own.
You have a deep understanding of how software is built and deployed.
You have direct experience in some of the following: AWS, Kubernetes, Datadog, Helm, Terraform, Docker, CI platforms like Github Actions, Jenkins or Travis-ci.
You have very strong verbal and written English communication skills
You’re comfortable with participatory management and take a servant leadership approach.
You have a track record of holding a team accountable to goals and aligned with company-wide strategic priorities, while maintaining high levels of autonomy on your team.
Perks and Benefits
We hope that you’re excited by the possibilities that come with working at Buffer! In addition to our unique culture, we also offer these fun perks and benefits.
? Competitive salary: Our salary formula adjusts to your cost of living and experience. For this role, the range is: $152,380 – $179,675 USD.
? Work remotely: Live and work wherever you like! We believe in folks working where they are happiest and most productive.
? Health insurance: We offer health insurance for all of our team members, international or US.
? Home office setup: Get a laptop + $500 to set up your home office.
? Growth mindset fund: Extra money for learning and development.
⛺️ Time to recharge: At least 3 weeks/year of minimum vacation, with no upper limit and currently we’re working a 4-day workweek.
? 401(k): With 3% company match.
? Profit sharing: When the company does well, all team members share the profits. We distribute 8-15% of profits annually to the team.
? Family leave: 3 months of family leave for all parents, and more is possible.
✈️ Retreats: When we can, we meet in person for company get-togethers twice per year.
☕️ Working smarter stipend: Get some extra cash for a co-working space or coffee shop work.
? Free books and Kindle: Get a free Kindle and all the free books – digital, physical, and audio – you like, anytime.
⛱ Sabbaticals: Take a 6-week break, fully paid, after every 5 years with Buffer.
Here’s our hiring process:
Stage 1: Application. Apply to join the team through the form below. If you don’t hear from us for the first week or two after submitting your application, don’t be alarmed. ? Step 2: Getting to know your values. You’ll speak with a member of our People team so we can learn more about your values and the value you will bring to Buffer. Step 3: Getting to know your role. You’ll chat with Katie, our VP of Engineering, so that she can learn more about your background, experience and achievements. Step 4: Brief exercise (async only). In this step of the process, you’ll showcase your managerial skills and leadership mindset. Step 5. Get know your team. You’ll chat with potential teammates about what it’s like to be a member of the team. Step 6: Get to know our technologies and your background. You’ll talk to Dan, our CTO, about how you’ve helped teams think through their technical decision making, made trade-offs, and prioritized technical requirements. This will not involve coding or white-boarding.
