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Engineering Manager, Growth

Role overview

Summary

This role focuses on leading engineering for Growth at Buffer, encompassing product and marketing surfaces. You will collaborate with various teams to enhance customer experiences and drive retention, while also contributing to the engineering culture and practices.

Qualifications

  • Experience managing engineers and facilitating their growth.
  • Strong engineering background with comfort in technical details.
  • Ambition for building with AI and guiding engineers in its use.
  • Clear communication skills and ability to work across disciplines.
  • Understanding of product growth and customer retention.

Responsibilities

  • Support engineers through regular coaching and feedback.
  • Shape priorities with Product, Design, and Marketing based on customer needs and data.
  • Stay close to technical decisions and product details to enhance user experiences.
  • Contribute to the wider Engineering team through hiring and shared practices.

Key facts

Hard skills

Other skills

  • Coaching
  • Decision Making
  • Communication
  • Collaboration
  • Problem Solving

About the company

Buffer logo

Buffer

  • AdTech & MarTech
  • Scaleup
  • 51–200
Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by brands, businesses, agencies, and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media. We have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration. Our products are carefully considered and highly refined in order to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively. Buffer is a team of real people, aligned in common values. Being a Buffer customer should feel like you have a whole team of people cheering for you. We want to see you succeed on social! Sign up for Buffer today and see the difference at www.buffer.com

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Job description

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. Since 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, you can learn more about Buffer on our Journey page. Still curious to learn more about the experience on the Buffer team? 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.

About the role

You’ll lead engineering for Growth at Buffer across both product and marketing surfaces. The work spans acquisition, activation, and retention. You’ll connect how people discover Buffer and decide to sign up and whether they stay.

We’re looking for someone who wants to stay close to the details, from where a customer gets stuck in a flow to the technical decisions that shape how it works. You’ll help the team decide which problems to solve, what to try first, and how to tell if we made things better for customers.

You'll partner closely with Product, Design, Marketing and Data to shape technical direction, create space for engineers to do their best work, and build a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.

What you'll do

  • Support engineers through regular coaching, clear feedback, and meaningful career conversations.

  • Shape priorities with Product, Design, and Marketing, bringing your own point of view and grounding decisions in customer needs & data.

  • Stay close to technical decisions and product details. Help the team build clear, accessible, responsive experiences, and help judge when to keep refining and when to ship and learn.

  • Help connect customer insights, product changes, and measurement so we understand whether our work is helping.

  • We're also changing how we build with AI. You'll have room to help shape that, through your own experiments and by helping the team develop good judgment and systems to work with AI effectively.

  • Contribute to the wider Engineering team through hiring, shared practices, and improvements to how we work.

What we're looking for

  • You've managed engineers and can talk concretely about helping people grow, giving feedback, and addressing performance concerns.

  • You care about how software feels to use. You notice unnecessary steps, unclear interactions, and details that get in someone's way. You could walk through something you helped build and explain the choices, compromises, and things you left out.

  • You have a strong engineering background and remain comfortable getting into technical details. That might mean reviewing code, exploring an architecture, building a prototype, or helping someone work through a difficult trade-off.

  • You’re ambitious about what you can build with AI. You use it in your own engineering work to take on bigger problems, and you know how to steer it, check its work, and make the calls that need your judgment. You help the engineers you lead do the same.

  • You communicate clearly in writing, take ownership, and work well with people across different disciplines and time zones.

  • You understand how a product helps a business grow, from how customers find it to why they pay for it and keep using it. You might have learned that through growth work and experimentation, or by growing a product as a founder or on an early-stage team. You use that understanding to decide what’s worth building and help engineers build it well.

  • You have a personal connection to making and sharing things. Maybe you've written a newsletter, shared your work online, built a side project, or run a small business. You understand something of the effort it takes to put your work out there and find an audience. You don't need a big following; we're interested in that connection and what it's taught you.

Our hiring process

  • Please express your interest below by sharing your LinkedIn profile and resume, and a short note about what interests you in the role and why you think it could be a good match. (If you choose to use AI while writing your message, please limit usage to light edits or research. We'd love to hear your own voice come through.)

  • If we'd like to explore the fit further, we'll reach out to learn more about you.

  • Our interview process includes a conversation with a member of our hiring team (Sara or Caro), meeting the hiring manager for this role (Kateryna), getting to know some teammates and peers (varies based on schedules), and meeting our CEO, Joel.

  • Our final stage is a two-day-long paid collaboration period. This is designed to mimic a real work project, so that we can each see what it's like to work together.

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