Senior Infrastructure Engineer

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.

• Treating engineers across Buffer as customers.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• You've run production Kubernetes.

• You know AWS and Terraform well. You default to modules, keep the code readable and adaptable, and can say what happens when a plan touches something load-bearing.
• You've operated production CI/CD and GitOps, including a rollback path you'd trust when something breaks in production.
• You've carried the pager for something you built.

• You've built internal developer tooling. CLIs, dev environments, per-PR environments. You've felt the difference between something that ships and something that gets used.
• You thrive in remote, async environments. You're clear in your thinking and generous with context.
• Slow and flaky bothers you.

• You're fluent with modern AI tools. You use them to debug, document, and reduce toil, not just to generate code.
• You make pragmatic build-vs-buy calls, you weigh what things cost to run, and you revisit both when conditions change.

• You have a personal stake in making and publishing things. What that looks like is yours to choose: writing, video, code, photos, music, a niche account with twelve followers. Audience size is not the point. We're a Team of Creators, and infra gets better the closer it sits to that experience.

• You've worked with Datadog, Sentry, or a similar observability stack, and you design logs and metrics with cost in mind.
• Prior Cloudflare experience across Workers, Zero Trust, and DNS.
• An open source Terraform module or tool you've contributed.

• Container orchestration and delivery. Kubernetes on EKS, Helm for charting, KEDA for SQS-driven autoscaling. ArgoCD for deploys from git. An in-house canary system that we want to augment with Argo Rollouts.

• CI/CD. GitHub Actions, with self-hosted AWS runners (including KVM-capable instances for Android UI tests). Our monorepo is the consolidation target, and we're moving more services into it over time.
• Observability and incidents. Datadog for logs, metrics, APM, and spans.

• Networking and DNS. Cloudflare across Workers, Zero Trust, DNS, and more. CloudFront for AWS-side distribution. VPC peering for cross-account connectivity. OctoDNS for DNS-as-code.
• Data stores. MongoDB fronted by GraphQL, Elasticsearch, Redis.
• Local development.

• Languages and runtimes. Node.js and TypeScript across most services, Python in selected services and tooling, and PHP for legacy services that are still load-bearing and being gradually replaced. INTERVIEW PROCESS Do you believe you're a fit for this role and want to join the Buffer team?

• When submitting your application and resume, take your time. This is your chance to make a strong first impression.
• While we have a couple of engineering roles open, we recommend applying to only one role.

• Response times can take a few days to weeks. We're a small team reviewing every application carefully. 2. Hiring manager interview. Chat with the hiring manager for your role (Miguel, Engineering Manager https://www.linkedin.com/in/migueldavid/) and another Engineering Leader to understand what it takes to work at Buffer.

• Final interview. You will have the opportunity to meet with our Executive Leadership team. This is a great chance for you to gain a deeper understanding of Buffer's strategy, values, and work processes. 7. Collaboration period. This is a stage where you would work with us on a real project over two days (fully paid).

• Showcase concrete examples of CI/CD pipeline improvements you have implemented, including metrics where possible.
• Prepare a brief case study on how you used AI or automation to speed up incident investigations.
• Emphasize your experience writing documentation that stays useful during off‑hours; bring a sample if you can.
• During interviews, be ready to discuss how you treat internal engineers as customers and what service‑orientation means to you.
• Highlight any work with KEDA, Argo Rollouts, or similar progressive delivery tools, even if it was a side project.
• Ask about Buffer’s remote‑first communication norms and their expectations for overlap with EMEA time zones.