Senior Product Engineer (Backend)

About Buffer

At Buffer, we make 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.

We’re a fully distributed team, and we’ve always aimed to do things a little differently at Buffer. Since the early days, we’ve had a focus 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.

We hire and work from all over the world. 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.

We're united by Buffer's values, and we celebrate our unique differences. We strive to create a diverse and inclusive work environment and are building a culture where underrepresented groups are welcome, and can flourish.

About the role

We’re looking for a senior backend engineer to join the Content team at Buffer. You’ll take the lead on building and evolving the systems behind how creators write, edit, and manage content — including AI-powered features, real-time collaboration, recommendation engine and the backend infrastructure that supports a fast, flexible, and reliable content creation experience.

We’re looking for someone who enjoys going deep — designing data models, shaping APIs, improving performance, and helping our systems scale with clarity and confidence. You’ll work closely with product, design, and frontend engineers to bring ideas to life and keep the editing experience smooth and resilient.

We work iteratively and in tight feedback loops, balancing thoughtful engineering with steady momentum. You’ll help us strengthen our internal platform, making it faster, more scalable, and better equipped to power content creation at scale. There’s real room here to shape this direction and make an impact.

What you’ll do

• Lead the development of the backend systems for our core content creation tools. This includes APIs for scheduling logic and content creation, offline data pipelines for recommender systems, and new AI-powered workflows.

• Improve and evolve our internal platform — 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.

• Take shared ownership of product quality and system health. You'll participate in our on-call rotation — all engineers take a 24/7 week-long shift roughly once a quarter. You'll also contribute to the ongoing work that keeps our systems running smoothly and continuously improving, like fixing bugs, addressing security vulnerabilities, and other improvements.

• Contribute to shaping our engineering culture by sharing knowledge, reviewing code, and leading by example.

Helpful skills and experience

• 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’re comfortable designing APIs, modeling data structures, and thinking about the performance and reliability of the full stack — not just in theory, but in day-to-day product work.

• You comfortable building both online and offline systems, and have a keen grasp on appropriate architectures for building products involving large amounts of data.

• 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 have a personal stake in the world of content creation, maybe you’ve run a newsletter, built an audience on social media, or regularly share your own work online. You’ve used Buffer before and care about the experience of planning, creating, and publishing content.

• 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 React and TypeScript for our web frontends

• We have 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 are in the process of migrating to GraphQL, we use Apollo Client in our web application

• We write automated tests with jest, react testing library (for integration tests) and Playwright (for e2e tests)

• On the backend, we use NodeJS, TypeScript and MongoDB

• We are running our services on AWS with Kubernetes. We follow a micro-services architecture and are currently moving our services into a central shared monorepo.

Interview process

Here's what our hiring process for this role is like.

1. Application. When submitting your application and resume, tell us why you want to join Buffer and take your time. This is your chance to make a strong first impression.

2. Hiring manager interview. Chat with the hiring manager for your role to understand what it takes to work at Buffer. This is an opportunity for both sides to get to know each other and determine whether our expectations align. Good candidates prepare questions, use our product, and clearly articulate what they look for in their role.

3. Async assignment. 30-minute asynchronous assignment to help us understand how you'd collaborate with the team.

4. Technical interviews. 1-2 interviews focused on system design, technical leadership, and engineering craft. No whiteboarding, live coding, or trick questions. This gives you a chance to meet a few engineers from Buffer.

5. Collaboration period. Work with us on a real project for about 10 hours (we'll pay you for your time). Expect async Slack communication, Zoom meetings, pairing sessions, and heads-down coding. You'll also meet more team members, including product managers and designers.

6. Final interview. You will have the opportunity to meet with Joel Gascoigne, our CEO. This is a great chance for you to gain a deeper understanding of Buffer's strategy, values, and work processes.

7. Offer. We wrap it up with an offer and discuss the final details. We would align on the last bits before we make you part of the Buffer team 💛

At Buffer, we value diversity of experience, and we understand that comes in many forms. We’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team. So, if your experience is close to what we’re looking for, please consider applying.

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