Design Engineer

About Buffer Buffer creates 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. Buffer is a fully distributed team, and we hire and work from all over the world. We 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. About the role We're looking for a Senior Design Engineer to join Buffer's Marketing team. You'll be the engineer closest to how Buffer looks and feels on the web — owning our front-end design system, building performant components, and crafting the interactions and animations that bring our pages to life. This is a small, agile team where members are trusted to manage their own time, and where you'll work across brand, product marketing, and growth projects. Buffer recently went through a significant brand redesign, and now we want to scale it. That means pushing our attention to design detail and craft further, improving site performance and accessibility, and creating the kind of consumer-grade web experiences that make people stop and notice. Our marketing site is the window into everything we're building, and as Buffer grows (both in the creators and small teams we serve, and in the product itself), we want the site to reflect that energy and ambition. You'll work closely with marketing leadership, our UX designer, and customer advocates to understand what our visitors need and figure out the best way to build it. You'll write and ship high-quality, tested code, and contribute to front-end engineering standards that raise the bar for consistency and quality across our marketing codebases. Working at Buffer is collaborative and positive thanks to our core values. We try to be "No Ego Doers" who are aware of our assumptions, and joining us means you'll work together as a team to test and confirm our ideas. Who you'll work with This role reports to Kateryna Porshnieva, Head of Engineering Operations, and sits on the Marketing team. You'll collaborate on a variety of Brand and Product Marketing projects with the full Marketing team, partnering closely with Simon Heaton, Director of Growth Marketing, and Hailley Griffis, Head of Communications and Content. You'll work day-to-day with most of the team, in particular Kate Baldrey, our Marketing UX Designer, to build web experiences that help people learn about and sign up for Buffer. What you'll do Build polished, interactive web experiences for buffer.com - product launch pages, brand storytelling, landing pages, and marketing tools - in close collaboration with Kate (UX Design) and the wider marketing team. Bring pages to life with thoughtful animations and interactions using Motion, CSS animations, or whatever approach fits. We want buffer.com to feel as good as our product, and you'll be the person making that happen. Evolve and maintain Buffer's design system and component library - improving consistency, filling gaps, and refining patterns so the whole team can ship high-quality pages without starting from scratch each time. Improve accessibility and performance across buffer.com through ongoing iteration - auditing what's there, fixing what needs fixing, and raising the standards over time so every visitor has a great experience. Help shape how we work by pairing with engineers, reviewing code, and sharing what you know about front-end architecture, design systems, and accessibility patterns. Helpful skills and experiences We'd love to see examples of your work - whether that's a portfolio, a personal site, open source contributions, or anything else that shows how you think about interaction quality, visual detail, and front-end craft. We're especially interested in animation work, component systems, or projects where you owned the implementation. You're a strong front-end engineer with solid experience in React and TypeScript. Our site runs on Next.js, but we care more about your depth of understanding and willingness to learn than matching our exact stack. Experience with Next.js App Router, SSR/ISR patterns, or Edge functions is a plus. You have hands-on experience with front-end animation - whether through Motion, CSS animations, or your own creative approach - and you've worked with design systems and component libraries. We're not starting from scratch here, so we're looking for someone who's good at improving and evolving existing systems, not just building new ones. You care about the details that make a web experience feel right: accessibility, performance, clean code, thoughtful trade-offs. You also know when something is good enough to ship and learn from. You think like a designer, not just an engineer. You have a strong sense of visual hierarchy, spacing, typography, and how users move through a page. You notice when something is technically correct but doesn't feel right - and you have opinions about how to fix it. You don't need a pixel-perfect spec for every state; you can make good UX decisions in code because you understand the intent behind the design. You're comfortable navigating ambiguity and thinking in systems — you bring clarity and ask good questions to move ideas forward even when requirements aren't fully defined. You look at the full system, understanding how different technologies and goals connect, and build things that can scale and improve holistically. You thrive in remote, async environments — you communicate clearly, support your teammates, and don't wait for permission to make progress. You work effectively across marketing, design, and engineering, and can explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders. You've likely been doing this for at least 5+ years, but depth of experience and impact matter more than a specific number of years. Our tech stack We use Next.js v15+ with React and TypeScript for buffer.com (current Pages router, migrating to App router). Express middleware for routing. Styling with CSS Modules and Motion; Radix UI and Base UI; data visualisations with Recharts. Marketing tech stack includes Segment, Google Tag Manager, Mixpanel, BigQuery. Content from Ghost CMS, Redash, Notion, Google Sheets and more. Interview process Do you believe you're a fit for this role? Our hiring process includes Application, Role Interview, Code review assignment, Technical interviews, Leadership Interview, Final Interview, Collaboration Period, Offer. We value diversity of experience and encourage applications.