Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Buffer

About Buffer

Buffer develops social media and brand-building software, empowering small businesses, creators, and individuals worldwide. Our mission is to equip small businesses with essential tools for growth, supported by exceptional customer service and uplifting content. Buffer is a fully distributed, remote first team with a unique and fulfilling workplace culture, emphasizing transparency. We share our metrics, successes, and failures on our Transparency Dashboard. United by Buffer's values, we foster a diverse and inclusive environment where underrepresented groups are welcome and can thrive. While primarily remote, team members are encouraged to attend in person company retreats once or twice a year to build deeper connections.

Role Details

This is a full time, remote Senior Infrastructure Engineer position within the Engineering Department, offering a competitive compensation range of $164,595, $212,744, plus equity. Buffer’s approach to salary, equity, and benefits is designed to be transparent, fair, simple, and generous.

About the Role

As Buffer's Senior Infrastructure Engineer, you will join a high-leverage team running the platform that enables every Buffer engineer to ship code efficiently and millions of creators to publish content and grow their online presence. Your work directly impacts feature delivery speed and system reliability for creators. You will significantly contribute to three key team initiatives:

• Keeping the Lights On at a Higher Bar: Enhance CI/CD pipelines for speed and anti-fragility, ensure smooth deployments, and transform incidents into valuable learning experiences.
• Modernizing the Foundation: Continuously improve Buffer's infrastructure, from deploying KEDA and Argo Rollouts to optimizing monitoring for better signal-to-noise ratio. Integrate AI deeper into daily operations for investigations and boilerplate tasks.
• Treating Engineers as Customers: Evolve developer tooling to accelerate the inner loop and improve documentation, making it accessible and helpful, even at 2 AM.

Buffer is a profitable, 15-year-old company at the forefront of AI-assisted development, offering impactful work in an exciting environment. We are remote first, with a preference for candidates who can overlap at least 4 hours with EMEA time zones, though we are open to strong candidates globally.

Who You'll Work With

You will report to Miguel, the Infrastructure Engineering Manager. Day to day, you will collaborate closely with Peter and Steven, two seasoned Infrastructure Engineers who have been instrumental in building Buffer's infrastructure from the beginning. The team seeks someone with deep infrastructure expertise combined with an infra-as-a-product mindset, bridging infrastructure and developer experience. You will also work daily with Buffer's unified Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) team, who are internal customers of the platform you maintain and contribute to its evolution.

What You'll Be Working On

• Own Production Platform Reliability: Manage the day to day reliability of our production platform, including EKS, ArgoCD, and AWS services. Optimize autoscaling, and approach incident response proactively to prevent recurrence. (On-call duties are distributed among all engineers at Buffer, roughly one week per quarter.)
• Build Progressive Delivery: Implement Argo Rollouts with robust rollback paths to ensure rapid recovery from deployment issues (seconds to minutes).
• Develop Internal Tools as Products: Evolve Buffer's in-house local development environment (BIBEs) and CLI tooling to make the inner development loop fast, frictionless, and parallel friendly, even for AI agents. Measure adoption and iterate based on user feedback.
• Reduce Operational Toil with AI: Automate low-risk workflows end to end using AI to free up the team for tackling complex problems. AI will assist humans in infrastructure management.
• Maintain Current Stack: Drive lifecycle upgrades for application runtimes (Node.js, Python), Kubernetes, EKS, and Helm versions. Manage Terraform-managed AWS services and address infrastructure side security vulnerabilities.
• Improve Platform Economics: Lead initiatives for visibility with Datadog, AWS rightsizing, and log filters to ensure observability and cloud spend grow slower than the company.
• Partner with EPD: Elevate documentation standards, contribute to weekly security work (dependency and vulnerability management), and foster shared ownership within the infra team to reduce single person dependencies.

Helpful Skills and Experience

Core Experience

We encourage applications if you align with most of the following:

• Experience as an Infrastructure Engineer, SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineer managing production systems.
• Proficiency in running production Kubernetes, including authoring Helm charts, tuning autoscaling, and maintaining stability under traffic.
• Strong command of AWS and Terraform, with a focus on modular, readable, and adaptable code.
• Experience operating production CI/CD and GitOps, including reliable rollback paths.
• Proven track record of carrying a pager for systems you built, leading incidents, writing follow ups, and improving alert systems.
• Experience building internal developer tooling, such as CLIs, dev environments, or per PR environments, with a focus on user adoption.
• Ability to thrive in remote, async environments, demonstrating clear thinking and generous context sharing.
• A proactive approach to resolving performance and reliability issues, iterating until the problem class is eliminated.
• Fluency with modern AI tools for debugging, documentation, and toil reduction.
• Pragmatic decision making on build vs. buy, weighing operational costs, and prioritizing fundamental investments over chasing new tools.
• A personal stake in creating and publishing content (writing, video, code, photos, music), reflecting a 'Team of Creators' mindset.

Bonus Points

• Current Buffer user or familiarity with the social media management space.
• Experience with Datadog, Sentry, or similar observability stacks, designing cost effective logs and metrics.
• Prior Cloudflare experience (Workers, Zero Trust, DNS).
• Contributions to open source Terraform modules or tools.

Our Tech Stack

• Cloud and IaC: AWS, GCP, Cloudflare. Services include EC2, EKS, S3, SQS, SNS, ECR, IAM, ALB, BigQuery, primarily managed with Terraform.
• Container Orchestration and Delivery: Kubernetes on EKS, Helm for charting, KEDA for SQS-driven autoscaling, ArgoCD for Git based deploys. In-house canary system augmented with Argo Rollouts. BIBEs and frontend branch deployments for per PR previews.
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions with self-hosted AWS runners (including KVM-capable instances for Android UI tests). A monorepo strategy is being pursued.
• Observability and Incidents: Datadog for logs, metrics, APM, and spans. Sentry for errors. Incident.io (and PagerDuty) for incident lifecycle management and postmortems.
• Networking and DNS: Cloudflare (Workers, Zero Trust, DNS), CloudFront for AWS distribution, VPC peering, OctoDNS for DNS as code.
• Data Stores: MongoDB fronted by GraphQL, Elasticsearch, Redis.
• Local Development: Hermes (in-house environment mirroring production) running in OrbStack, pre-built production containers from ECR.
• Languages and Runtimes: Node.js and TypeScript for most services, Python for selected services and tooling, and PHP for legacy services undergoing gradual replacement.

Interview Process

If you believe you are a fit for this role and wish to join the Buffer team, we encourage you to apply through the form below. Here’s an overview of our hiring process:

1. Application: Submit your application and resume thoughtfully. While multiple engineering roles are open, we recommend applying to only one; we will reroute internally if a better fit is identified. Response times may vary (days to weeks) as our small team carefully reviews each application.
2. Hiring Manager Interview: A conversation with Miguel (Engineering Manager) and another Engineering Leader to assess mutual expectations and fit.
3. Take Home Exercise: A two page maximum asynchronous assignment to evaluate your system thinking, assumptions, and technical communication.
4. Technical Interview: Interview with two Infrastructure Engineers (Peter and Steven) focusing on your technical experience and approach.
5. Leadership Interview: A discussion with one or two Engineering Leaders regarding your leadership style, impact generation in a cross functional company, and approach to work and collaboration.
6. Final Interview: An opportunity to meet with our Executive Leadership team to gain insights into Buffer's strategy, values, and processes.
7. Collaboration Period: A two day, fully paid project where you will work with the team on a real project, allowing both parties to experience the collaboration dynamics.
8. Offer: Discussion of the final offer and details.