Engineering Manager, Growth

Buffer; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Buffer is seeking a Growth Engineering Lead to steer the end-to-end technical direction for growth across product and marketing surfaces. You’ll influence acquisition, activation, and retention, partnering with Product, Design, Marketing and Data to ship impactful experiences.

You’ll be close to the code, guide engineers, mentor teams, and shape how we apply AI to improve customer outcomes, while fostering a culture of ownership and continuous improvement across a fully distributed workforce.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineers and growing teams.
• Strong written communication and cross-functional collaboration.
• Ability to translate customer needs into technical direction.
• Experience applying AI to product engineering is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Provide coaching, feedback, and career conversations.
• Shape priorities with Product, Design, and Marketing based on customer needs and data.
• Stay close to technical decisions and help ship and learn.
• Connect customer insights, product changes, and metrics to measure impact.
• Help shape AI with experiments and building systems to work with AI effectively.
• Contribute to wider Engineering through hiring and best practices.

Skills

People management

Engineering leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Written communication

AI familiarity

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

• 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.