Senior Backend Engineer; Platform and API

About Buffer

We create 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.

Buffer is a fully distributed team, and we’ve always aimed to do things a little differently ce the early days, we’ve focused 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're united by Buffer's values, and we hire and work from all over the world. We strive to create a diverse and inclusive work environment, and we are building a culture where underrepresented groups are welcome and can flourish. 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.

As you get to know Buffer and consider joining the journey, feel free to read more from Kirsti and Sabreen as they share their first experiences with Buffer, as well as from Hailley, who captured why she still calls Buffer home after 8+ years.

We’re looking for a senior backend engineer to join the Channels and Platform team  will play a key role in building our public API and creating a future plug‑in ecosystem that would elevate Buffer into a platform other developers can build on top of, providing creators the next generation of tools for writing, editing, and managing content.

We’re looking for someone with first‑hand experience designing, implementing, and maintaining public APIs and/or extensibility platforms, 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 mobile + web engineers to bring ideas to life and keep the user experience smooth and resilient.

We work iteratively and in tight feedback loops, balancing thoughtful engineering with steady momentum. In addition to building a new platform, you’ll help us strengthen our internal systems, making them faster, more scalable, and better equipped to power content creation re’s real room here to shape this direction and make an impact.

• 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, improving tooling and observability, and reducing 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.

• 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, Type Script, Graph
  
  QL, and Mongo
  
  DB.
• 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…