Senior Design Engineer

About this role

ABOUT BUFFER

We create social media and brand-building software for small businesses, creators, and individuals. 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 our customers believe they can succeed and do good along the way.

Buffer is a fully distributed team, and we’ve always aimed to do things a little differently at Buffer. Since the early days, we’ve focused on building one of the most unique and fulfilling workplaces by rethinking a lot of traditional practices. We also default to transparency, so you can read all about our metrics, and our successes and failures along the way on our Transparency Dashboard https://buffer.com/open.

We're united by Buffer's values https://buffer.com/about#values, and we hire and work from all over the world. We strive to create a diverse and inclusive work environment, and we are building a culture where underrepresented groups are welcome and can flourish. Please note that we do travel to work together in person once or twice per year, and those events are highly encouraged to build deeper connections among our small team.

As you get to know Buffer and consider joining the journey, you can learn more about Buffer on our Journey https://buffer.com/journey page. Still curious to learn more about the experience on the Buffer team? Feel free to read more from Kirsti https://buffer.com/resources/first-30-days-buffer/ and Sabreen https://buffer.com/resources/joined-3-days-before-the-retreat/ as they share their first experiences with Buffer, as well as from Hailley https://buffer.com/resources/8-years-at-buffer/, who captured why she still calls Buffer home after 8+ years.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to join Buffer's Marketing team. You'll be the engineer closest to how Buffer looks and feels on the web — owning our front-end design system, building performant components, and crafting the interactions and animations that bring our pages to life. This is a small, agile team where members are trusted to manage their own time, and where you'll work across brand, product marketing, and growth projects.

Buffer recently went through a significant brand redesign, and now we want to scale it. That means pushing our attention to design detail and craft further, improving site performance and accessibility, and creating the kind of consumer-grade web experiences that make people stop and notice. Our marketing site is the window into everything we're building, and as Buffer grows (both in the creators and small teams we serve, and in the product itself), we want the site to reflect that energy and ambition.

You'll work closely with marketing leadership, our UX designer, and customer advocates to understand what our visitors need and figure out the best way to build it. You'll write and ship high-quality, tested code, and contribute to front-end engineering standards that raise the bar for consistency and quality across our marketing codebases. Working at Buffer is collaborative and positive thanks to our core values. We try to be "No Ego Doers" who are aware of our assumptions, and joining us means you'll work together as a team to test and confirm our ideas.

WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH

This role reports to Kateryna Porshnieva https://www.linkedin.com/in/kporshnieva/, Head of Engineering Operations, and sits on the Marketing team. You'll collaborate on a variety of Brand and Product Marketing projects with the full Marketing team, partnering closely with Simon Heaton https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatonsimon/, Director of Growth Marketing, and Hailley Griffis https://www.linkedin.com/in/hailleygriffis/, Head of Communications and Content.

You'll work day-to-day with most of the team, in particular Kate Baldrey https://www.linkedin.com/in/katebaldrey/, our Marketing UX Designer, to build web experiences that help people learn about and sign up for Buffer.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Build polished, interactive web experiences for buffer.com http://buffer.com - product launch pages, brand storytelling, landing pages, and marketing tools - in close collaboration with Kate (UX Design) and the wider marketing team.

- Bring pages to life with thoughtful animations and interactions using Motion, CSS animations, or whatever approach fits. We want buffer.com http://buffer.com to feel as good as our product, and you'll be the person making that happen.

- Evolve and maintain Buffer's design system and component library - improving consistency, filling gaps, and refining patterns so the whole team can ship high-quality pages without starting from scratch each time.

- Improve accessibility and performance across buffer.com http://buffer.com through ongoing iteration - auditing what's there, fixing what needs fixing, and raising the standards over time so every visitor has a great experience.

- Help shape how we work by pairing with engineers, reviewing code, and sharing what you know about front-end architecture, design systems, and accessibility patterns.

HELPFUL SKILLS AND EXPERIENCES

- We'd love to see examples of your work - whether that's a portfolio, a personal site, open source contributions, or anything else that shows how you think about interaction quality, visual detail, and front-end craft. We're especially interested in animation work, component systems, or projects where you owned the implementation.

- You're a strong front-end engineer with solid experience in React and TypeScript. Our site runs on Next.js, but we care more about your depth of understanding and willingness to learn than matching our exact stack. Experience with Next.js App Router, SSR/ISR patterns, or Edge functions is a plus.

- You have hands-on experience with front-end animation - whether through Motion, CSS animations, or your own creative approach - and you've worked with design systems and component libraries. We're not…