Overview

More than 4 million users and 70,000 paying customers depend on Buffer, and we’re grateful to work every day developing intuitive features to make their experience better. We’re looking for an engineering manager for our web product engineering team. You’ll be supporting 6-8 engineers across 1-2 teams and reporting to a director of engineering.

At Buffer, we value engineering managers who are able to craft a fulfilling work environment for each engineer and lead effective teams where folks are productive and contributing at a high level.

We value creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and are actively working on building a culture where under-indexed groups are truly welcomed and can flourish. As a leader on our team, we expect that you will contribute actively to this aspect of our culture.

As an Engineering Manager at Buffer, you will:

  • Lead engineering team(s) to ship high quality software on predictable schedules during our six-week product cycles.
  • Manage the context in which team members operate, including:
    • Represent the team in planning and product meetings
    • Translate engineering team vision into action
    • Coordinate with Product Managers and other areas such as Quality, Marketing and Customer Advocacy.
  • Have regular one on ones with engineers, where you will:
    • Set expectations, provide regular feedback & keep team members accountable
    • Develop a strong two-way feedback loop where you share organizational context and build a deep understanding of the engineer and how they work
    • Support engineers and help reach a resolution when challenges arise
    • Craft a fulfilling and engaging work experience through regular career growth and development conversation
    • Iterate and improve our engineering processes and technical culture
    • Participate in hiring and onboarding of engineers
    • Maintain a strong and up-to-date understanding of the challenges and opportunities your team is facing building and deploying software. Most of your time won’t be spent coding, but you should get your hands in the code regularly to maintain context.

Buffer is an equal opportunity employer that has the chance to add teammates from anywhere in the world! We’re united by Buffer’s values, and we celebrate our unique differences.

Helpful Skills and Experience

  • You have experience leading an engineering team, either as an engineering manager, or as a senior engineer/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.
  • Our buffer-web repo is currently transitioning from a php backend monolith with Backbone.js and React.js, to a service-orientated architecture using Node.js with React components. The API remains in PhP.
  • Full stack engineering knowledge with any server-side language and JavaScript (on both client and server) would be helpful.
  • You have very strong verbal and written English communication skills.
  • You’re comfortable with participatory management. 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.

What We Value

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.

Your First 45 Days

With our strong focus on culture, we find it helpful to make sure that, after the interviews are over and you’re getting your hands dirty, it still feels like a great fit. To do this, we have a 45 day starting period where you’ll have three buddies to learn about Buffer culture and the Engineering Manager role.

It is our value to treat people right, so if things don’t quite work out as planned, we don’t want to put people into a difficult situation financially. To counter that risk, we offer a full pay-out of the 45 day period at any period of time. So if you’re two weeks in and you’re not enjoying it, you can get an extra month of pay and move on. If you’re 5 weeks in and you feel like it’s not right, we’ll pay you the full 45-days plus an extra 3 weeks.

Like most things at Buffer, this is continually evolving. Here’s what the current timeline typically looks like.

Where You’ll Work

You will work in the place in the world that makes you happy, that inspires you daily, and helps you to become the person that you wish to be. You will work with team members scattered around the world and across time zones to build a better culture and product.

More about how we work remotelySee where the Buffer team is now

Still reading? We want to hear from you!

Send Deborah a note about yourself, why you’re interested in becoming an Engineering Manager at Buffer, and include any relevant links (personal website, links to live projects you’ve been part of crafting, Github).

We’re experimenting with a new transparent hiring timeline in which we open up a window for candidates to share their interest in joining the Buffer team! Once the initial application period comes to an end, we’ll spend some time excitingly reading through all applications and then chatting with potential teammates.

Here’s a tentative timeline:

  • Tuesday, July 25th – Sunday August 20th:Apply to join our team!
  • Monday, August 21st – Friday, September 1st:We’ll spend time reviewing and scheduling follow-up interviews
  • Monday, September 4th – Friday, September 29th:Culture and technical interviews