Buffer - Senior Backend Engineer (Platform and API) – Buffer
Requirements
• You have practical experience designing, implementing, and maintaining public APIs, plug-in ecosystems, or extensibility platforms. • You have deep experience with modern stack — we use Node.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, and MongoDB. • You’ve led backend projects from start to finish — shaping architecture, guiding trade-offs, and delivering reliable systems that support real-world product needs. • You have strong systems thinking. You look beyond the immediate task, anticipate downstream effects, and help teams converge on architecture that supports the long game. • You’ve worked across teams to drive platform or infrastructure improvements — whether simplifying service boundaries, improving observability, or evolving internal tooling. • You’ve contributed to collaborative or multi-user product features, and you understand the data, consistency, and UX considerations that come with them. • You’re fluent with modern AI tools — not just using them for code generation, but integrating them into how you debug, document, explore ideas, and reduce manual effort. • You care about performance, scale, and clean abstractions — and know how to measure, prioritize, and improve them pragmatically. • You’ve influenced engineering culture through code reviews, mentoring, or leading by example, and you’re comfortable being a resource for others on architectural decisions. • You thrive in remote, async environments. You’re clear in your thinking, generous with context, and don’t wait for perfect information to get started. • You’ve likely been doing this for 7+ years, but experience depth and impact matter more to us than a specific number. • Our tech stack • We use NodeJS, TypeScript, and MongoDB, but part of our core legacy systems are written in PHP (including old APIs) • We are in the process of migrating to GraphQL, and we use Apollo Client in our web application. • We are running our services on AWS with Kubernetes. We follow a microservices architecture and are currently moving our services into a central shared monorepo. • On the frontend, we use React and TypeScript for our web frontends • We have an internal design system called Popcorn that we started developing last year. It is built with Radix primitives, CSS modules, Storybook, and our own system of design tokens • We write automated tests with jest, react testing library (for integration tests), and Playwright (for e2e tests)
Responsibilities
• Be part of a small, dedicated squad within the Channels and Platform team responsible for Public API development. • Lead the development of the backend systems for the Buffer Platform. This includes creating an API for core Buffer features, internal services to ensure Public API stability, availability, high performance, and developer tools for platform clients. • Improve and evolve our internal systems — helping consolidate services into a monorepo, improve tooling and observability, and reduce complexity across the board. • Collaborate closely with engineers, product, and design to scope work, explore trade-offs, and find the simplest path to something great. • Make steady improvements to performance, reliability, and data modeling, helping us scale quality over time. • Participate in on-call rotation (all engineers take on a 24/7 week-long shift once a quarter on average) and day-to-day maintenance work required to keep the lights on the systems owned by the team (this includes bug fixing, addressing security vulnerabilities, incident follow-ups, etc.) • Contribute to shaping our engineering culture by sharing knowledge, reviewing code, and leading by example.
Benefits
• $156,487 – $202,264 • Offers Equity • We strive for Buffer’s approach to salary, equity, and benefits to be: • Read more about our compensation philosophies and approach here. • Upload your resume here to autofill key application fields. • Drop your resume here! • Parsing your resume. Autofilling key fields... • Example: she/her • Please make sure this email is correct - this will be our primary way to contact you! • or drag and drop here • The role is fully remote, but this will help us understand your timezone for scheduling interviews. • If you have a personal website, please share a link • In addition to your LinkedIn and Personal website, if you're using any other social media (Instagram, X, BlueSky, Facebook, etc.) and are open to it, we'd love it if you could share those links: • Describe an API/SDK you’ve recently designed from scratch. What design decisions did you make and why? • Tell us about a time when you were wrong about something at work. What happened, and how did you handle it? • Based on your experience using Buffer, what would you change or build? This could be a specific improvement, a new feature, or a broader strategic shift in direction. • This could be anything - technical or not. Something you built, a new tool you tried, something you learned from a book or a side project. We’re more interested in how you share ideas than the topic itself. • As a remote team, we use video a lot - in meetings and pairing sessions, sharing Looms in Slack or adding demos to pull requests. It’s just part of how we work day-to-day, which is why we decided to include it in our hiring process too.Think of it as a casual conversation with a teammate. No need for slides, script, editing, or polish. Just speak naturally and feel free to share your screen if it helps tell the story, like you would in a team call. • We know this is a big ask. But if your application is a strong fit, we’ll absolutely watch your video - and you’ll hear back from us either way.Feel free to use the free version of Loom, or any other video recorder and share a link with us.
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