About the role

We’re looking to hire an experienced infrastructure/platform engineer to join our top-notch team of engineers who are responsible for building and operating our engineering platform at Buf. As a startup, our infrastructure team has the opportunity to work on a wide variety of problems with the goal of making it easier to build, deploy, and operate our products. Our team doesn’t just treat software like a black box — we’re empowered (and encouraged) to reach in and help improve the software.

This team’s responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Making multi-cloud configuration and management a breeze for both Google Cloud and AWS resources (e.g. Crossplane, GKE, EKS, managed Postgres).
• Ensuring we have the appropriate environments to validate changes and squash bugs before they reach customers (local, review, and staging environments).
• Maintaining high availability and high release velocity through a seamless deployment and staged release process (e.g. ArgoCD) across multiple production topologies (multi-tenant, single-tenant, and on-prem).
• Enabling excellent observability by empowering engineers to create delightful dashboards and effective alerts (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana).
• Keeping nefarious actors at bay with proper security and access controls, and proving it to our customers by maintaining SOC 2 compliance (e.g. Secureframe, Okta).

You will be responsible for:

• Designing and building solutions for production-ready infrastructure systems.
• Understanding the technical, functional, and business needs of our platform.
• Developing systems that support the security, integrity, availability, and performance of our products.
• Supporting incident management activities that ensure high availability and reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR).
• Handling 1-week on-call rotations (though we rarely get paged).

About you

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Demonstrated expert-level knowledge from 5+ years of experience owning projects as part of a team of software engineers in areas relevant to this role.
• A track record of architecting and building robust and reliable production-grade distributed systems.
• The ability to move quickly and pragmatically while managing trade-offs.
• Excellent communication skills and organizational abilities.

Ideal candidates would also have:

• Experience with one or more of the specific technologies mentioned in this job description (e.g. gRPC, Protobuf, Kubernetes).
• Experience working on products that target developers (e.g. dev tools).
• A bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Mathematics.
• Working hours that significantly overlap Eastern Time.

Interview process

Our total interview process is approximately 4 hours. Here is what you can expect:

• Introductory stage
  • [30m] Screening interview
  • [60m] Hiring manager interview
• Team interviews
  • [60m] Writing and understanding software interview
  • [60m] Technical knowledge and communication interview
• Final conversations
  • [30m] CEO interview

We will reserve time in each interview so we can answer any questions you might have, and you are welcome to request additional conversations anytime during the process if that would be helpful for your decision-making.