Infrastructure/Platform Engineer

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 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. Kubernetes, Helm, 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 with the following attributes:

• 5+ years of industry experience owning projects as part of a team of software engineers in areas relevant to this role.
• Demonstrated ability to shape, scope, plan, and execute work given an objective.
• Proficient in Go with multiple years of professional experience using it regularly.
• Proficient at deploying and operating Kubernetes clusters using Helm with multiple years of professional experience.
• Professional experience managing cloud infrastructure AWS or GCP using infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and Crossplane.
• Professional experience setting up effective alerts and observability dashboards using Prometheus and Grafana.
• Excellent communication skills and organizational abilities.
• The ability to move quickly and pragmatically while managing trade-offs.
• A bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Mathematics.
• Eastern Time working hours or very close to it (candidates in Pacific Timezone need to have working hours that start at 8am PT or earlier)

Ideal candidates would also have:

• Experience with other technologies that the team uses.
  • ArgoCD, Secureframe, GitHub actions, Protobuf, gRPC
• Experience working on products that target developers (e.g. dev tools).
• Experience managing Kafka deployments.
• Experience working at a startup.

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] Coding interview (in Go)
  • [60m] System design 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/>.