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.
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 a 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 the 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.
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.
While this role is completely remote, the engineers on this team are based in timezones from East Asia to Northern Africa. We would prefer a candidate with considerable overlap with these timezones.
We’re looking for a Director of Infrastructure to take Buffer’s cloud infrastructure and application delivery to the next level. You will set the strategy, develop the roadmap and lead a team of, currently, 4 engineers to fulfill the team’s mission to provide a best-in-class platform for delivery for all engineers at Buffer. You will be able to shape the future of this team including the size and make up of it. You will report directly to Buffer’s CTO.
Our infrastructure team has highly tenured engineers that work across DevOps, site reliability, security, infrastructure management, and overall developer workflow. You are the person that brings this all together into a cohesive strategy in order for Buffer to deliver a great product to our customers every day.
Over the last few years, Buffer’s infrastructure has aimed to use some of the latest and greatest tech to enable our product engineers to build and ship great products. We began using Docker in the start of 2015, were early adopters of Kubernetes back in 2016, and we fully automated branch-based deployment environments in 2017. We want you to continue to push us forward whether that’s continuing to push our continuous deployment practices to the next level or transforming our product to run serverless.
More on the Infrastructure team
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 fingertips to source control (e.g. Github)
- Delivery of that code 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 source control (Github) to automated testing environments, staging environments, then automatically to production with 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 organization.
Who you are
- You are passionate about the mission listed above.
- You have a track record of leading and managing engineering teams understanding that the key to your success is enabling and empowering your engineers to achieve great things by leading with clear context and strategy, building trusting relationships, and holding your team accountable to results.
- You stay on top of the cutting edge of cloud infrastructure and modern developer workflows and have some opinions about what the future of both will look like.
- You have deep knowledge, but you know there is always more to learn.
- You have excellent verbal and written English language skills and know what it takes to lead with context.
- You have strong experience with AWS or other cloud providers and know-how to leverage their tools and services.
- You have managed Infrastructure teams (or similar) in the past in some form.
- You have been an engineer on an Infrastructure team (or similar) and understand the types of roles your team will have.
- You have direct experience in or have led teams using some of the following: AWS, Kubernetes, Datadog, Helm, Terraform, Docker, CI platforms like Github Actions, Jenkins or Travis-ci.
- You’ve worked on something with considerable scale.
What you’ll do
- Set the Engineering organization’s infrastructure strategy and roadmap aligned with the team’s mission, Buffer’s technical strategy, and the company strategy.
- Represent the Infrastructure team and the engineering organization in key planning meetings with leaders across the EPD organization (Engineering-Product-Design).
- Speak with engineers and managers across the engineering organization to understand our delivery challenges and formulate strategies and roadmaps to drive change.
- Directly manage a team of engineers through regular 1-1s, setting clear expectations, delivering and receiving feedback, supporting their career development, and resolving challenges on your team among many other facets of engineering management.
- Shape the culture and processes of your team and the engineering organization.
- Maintain relationships with key infrastructure vendors (e.g. AWS, Datadog, MongoDB) to understand ways to improve the usage of third-party tools, guide the team’s adoption, and handle yearly contract renewals.
- Hire and onboard new engineers for your team.
Do you want to be the person to lead Buffer’s infrastructure to the next level?
- 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 a Director of Infrastructure, Engineering Manager, a Technical Project Manager or as a Technical Lead.
- 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.
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: $210,677-$234,085.
🏝 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.
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: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.
Step 4: Brief exercise (async only). In this step of the process, you'll showcase your managerial skills and leadership mindset.
Step 5. Get to know your team. You'll chat with potential teammates about what it's like to be a member of the team.
Data source
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