Engineering Manager - Infrastructure

Buf is building a new paradigm for APIs. Our open source and commercial software helps companies adopt Protobuf schemas throughout their stack, from gRPC APIs to streaming data in Kafka. Founded in 2020, we have raised money from leading investors, including Lightspeed, Tiger, and Addition. We're deployed everywhere from small startups to the world's largest enterprises, and we'd love your help growing even faster. Check out our open source projects on GitHub and join our Slack community to see what Buf is all about.

About The Role

We're looking to hire an experienced engineering manager to lead 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).
  
  

Your responsibilities include:

• Building and maintaining a roadmap for the team that optimizes for relevant business outcomes.
• Driving communication with stakeholders and customers (both internal and external) to validate priorities and planned solutions, identify risks and issues, and communicate progress toward goals.
• Ensuring the team is reliably delivering on well-scoped iterative milestones with concrete timelines.
• Guiding the team to balance short term and long term objectives to design solutions that are appropriate for Buf's size and stage.
• Creating a collaborative and productive team environment where people are challenged to grow and motivated to do their best work.
• Hiring high quality engineers to grow the team when the need arises.
  
  

About You

We're looking for someone who has:

• Demonstrated expert-level knowledge from 7+ years of experience working as an engineer or engineering manager in ownership areas similar to this role.
• 2+ years of professional experience managing and leading a team of software engineers with ownership areas similar to this role.
• A track record of architecting 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).
• A bachelors or master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Mathematics.
• Working hours in Eastern Time.
  
  

Interview process

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

• Introductory stage
• [30m] Screening interview
• [45m] Hiring manager interview
• Team interviews
• [60m] Engineering management 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.

At Buf, we embrace diversity. We know that diverse teams make great teams, and we encourage people from all backgrounds and life experiences to apply. It is our goal to ensure that our workplace can be anyone's workplace. If your experience isn't an exact match for this job description, we encourage you to apply anyway! We're always looking to add diversity of thought and perspective to our team.

By submitting an application, you agree to the retention of your personal data for consideration for a future position at Buf. More details about Buf's privacy practices can be found at: https://buf.build/resources/privacy/.