Senior Infrastructure 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:

As Buffer's next Senior Infrastructure Engineer, you'll join two seasoned Infrastructure Engineers on a small, deliberate, high-leverage team. Together, you'll run the platform that lets every Buffer engineer ship, and that indirectly lets millions of creators publish, grow, and earn a living on the social web. When our infrastructure is fast and reliable, creators get features sooner and outages less often.

You'll own a meaningful slice of three shifts the team is making.

- Keeping the lights on at a higher bar. You'll make our CI/CD pipelines faster and even more anti-fragile, ship boring deploys, and turn each incident into a new lesson rather than a repeat.

- Modernizing the foundation. Buffer is not new, but our Infra is in continuous improvement. From deploying KEDA and Argo Rollouts to improving our signal-to-noise ratio in monitoring, there is plenty to do. One cannot talk about modernization without mentioning AI. We're already leaning on it for investigations and boilerplate, and want to bring it deeper into our day-to-day.

- Treating engineers across Buffer as customers. You'll evolve the developer tooling that makes the inner loop fast, with documentation that holds up at 2am or when consumed by an agent.

We're remote-first with a preference for at least 4 hours of overlap with EMEA time zones, but we're open to strong candidates anywhere in the world.

It's an exciting time to join. Buffer is a profitable, 15-year-old company innovating at the edge of AI-assisted development, and there's lots of impactful work to do.

WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH:

In this role, you'll report to Miguel https://www.linkedin.com/in/migueldavid/, the Infrastructure Engineering Manager.

Day-to-day you'll work closely with Peter https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-emil/ and Steven https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenc81/, who have helped build the infrastructure we run on since the beginning of Buffer. We're looking to round out the team with someone who sits between infra and developer experience: deep infra expertise paired with an infra-as-a-product mindset.

You'll also work daily with all of EPD (Buffer's unified Engineering, Product, and Design team). EPD are the internal customers of the platform you maintain, and they contribute to it too.

WHAT YOU'LL BE WORKING ON

- Own the day-to-day reliability of our production platform. Keep EKS, ArgoCD, and the AWS surface area boring, tune autoscaling so the system adjusts well under load, and approach incident response in a way that each incident teaches us something new instead of repeating itself. (On-call is distributed across all engineers at Buffer, a week-long shift roughly once a quarter.)

- Build progressive delivery into something the rest of engineering trusts. Implement Argo Rollouts with clean rollback paths, so the time between "this deploy is bad" and "this deploy is reverted" measures in seconds to minutes.

- Build developer tools as products, instead of loose scripts. Evolve our in-house local development environment, BIBEs https://peteremil.com/buffers-bibes/ (Buffer Isolated Build Environments, per-PR full-stack staging deployments), and our CLI tooling so the inner loop is fast, frictionless, and parallel-friendly for AI agents. Measure adoption, talk to your users, iterate.

- Reduce operational toil with AI. Automate low-risk workflows end-to-end so the team spends its time on the hard problems, not the repeat ones. AI doesn't touch infrastructure directly, it speeds up the humans who do.

- Keep the stack current. Drive lifecycle upgrades: application runtimes (Node.js, Python), Kubernetes, EKS, Helm versions, and the Terraform-managed surface area. Own infra-side security vulnerabilities.

- Improve the economics of our platform. Lead visibility work on Datadog, AWS rightsizing, and log filters so observability and cloud spend grow slower than the company does.

- Partner with EPD on the platform they build on. Raise the documentation bar with the team, carry your share of weekly security work (dependency and vulnerability management is everyone's job), and help the infra team grow toward shared ownership and fewer single-person dependencies.

HELPFUL SKILLS AND…