Lead Security Engineer at Buffer

Who you’ll work with You’ll report to Miguel, Engineering Manager for the Infrastructure and Security teams.

Day-to-day, the Security team is you, Adnan, and Miguel. Adnan knows how everything at Buffer fits together and where the sharp edges are. Together, you’ll own planned security work as well as the work that keeps the lights on: the security inbox, requests from other teams, maintenance, and chores. You’ll lead the team’s direction and standards.

You will also work closely with product engineering teams to ensure that what we build meets a strong security bar. That means collaborating on tech spec reviews and growing the group of security champions across the teams.

Your peers from our Advocacy (customer support) and People teams will rely on you to support them with security and compliance needs that come up in their work, from customer security questions to vendor reviews and policy.

What you’ll be working on 🧭 Lead security at Buffer. Define the strategy and roadmap, set priorities, drive execution, and change how we work where it matters. If you see a problem outside your lane, say so and drive the fix.

🧰 Build. Identify the problem, define the solution, then build it with Adnan: tooling, automation, processes.

🔁 Put security in the development loop. Check on every PR, threat modeling in tech specs, dependency, secrets, and supply chain hygiene, and review steps that hold up as more of our code is written with AI agents.

🔐 Advance operational security. Secure our day-to-day operations to meet industry-wide standards while maintaining the flexibility afforded by Buffer’s high-trust environment.

💡 Keep the lights on. Security inbox, requests from other teams, maintenance and chores, shared with Adnan. Much of this is manual today, and we’d love you to automate what you can.

🚨 Lead incidents and take part in our engineering-wide on-call rotation. Set the standard for how we run a security incident, then hold the team to it. Run tabletops with the rest of Engineering, and ensure the gaps are fixed.

🤖 Secure the AI surface. Threat-model what we’re building, from agents with tool access to connectors and in-product AI, and set guardrails so Buffer can move fast on AI without guessing.

🐛 Run vulnerability disclosure. Triage reports from outside researchers, fix or route the real ones, and decide how the program grows.

🤝 Own compliance and customer trust. SOC 2 and Meta platform compliance are the big ones today. We want them to make Buffer safer, not only to pass audits, but also to automate evidence where you can. Security questionnaires reach us through Advocacy. Help answer them, and build what lets customers find answers on their own (a Trust Center, for example).

Helpful skills and experience You’ve been the senior security person somewhere without a CISO above you. You know what it means to set direction without a mandate and earn it through work.

You have hands-on application and API security depth in a multi-tenant SaaS, ideally one with a public API: authorization models, OAuth and OIDC, session and auth flows, IDOR and SSRF, and threat modeling. You've found these bugs and fixed them, not only reported them.

You write code. You can read and change a TypeScript codebase well enough to ship a fix and review someone else’s (legacy PHP and Python show up more rarely, too).

You’ve led security incidents end-to-end, including the writing of status updates, customer comms, and postmortems that people act on.

You’ve worked with AWS, Kubernetes, and Cloudflare, or similar, enough to reason about infrastructure risk with an infrastructure team. You don’t need to run it.

You’ve run a SOC 2 or similar program, or worked closely with one, and you’d rather automate evidence collection than do it by hand.

You've run or triaged a vulnerability disclosure or bug bounty program, and you can tell a real report from noise quickly.

You have strong opinions, and you can hold them loosely. You are comfortable disagreeing with a senior engineer’s design, and working together to find the best solution (sometimes changing your mind when their argument is better).

You’re fluent with modern AI tools, and you use them to multiply your output and your team’s. You’ve thought hard about securing systems that use them.

You thrive in remote, async environments, and you follow through. You're clear in your thinking and generous with context, and you close the loop on what you commit to. Most of your influence here will be written.

Bonus points if you’re already a Buffer user or familiar with social media management tools.

Our tech stack Product. Node.js (TypeScript) across most services in a monorepo, backed by MongoDB; a REST API and PHP being retired for legacy services. iOS and Android apps. A public GraphQL API, MCP server, CLI, and connectors.

Infrastructure. AWS (EKS, IAM, SQS, S3, CloudFront), Terraform, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Cloudflare (WAF, Zero Trust, Workers, DNS).

Security and compliance. Vanta for SOC 2, Dependabot, gitleaks, AWS GuardDuty, Cloudflare WAF and Zero Trust, Action1 for device management, 1Password, and Google Workspace as the identity layer.

Observability and incidents. Datadog, Sentry, incident.io, and PagerDuty.

AI. Claude Team across the company, internal agents and MCP servers built in-house, in-product AI features.

Apply for the job Do you believe you're a fit for this role and want to join the Buffer team? We'd love to hear about you!

Here's what our hiring process looks like:

Application. A short form with your CV, LinkedIn, a few yes/no questions, and an example of your writing.

Questionnaire. If there’s a match, we’ll email you a short set of questions to learn a bit more about you!

Interview process: Meet with several teammates across a few Zoom calls, starting with Miguel, Engineering Manager for Infrastructure and Security, and the hiring manager for this role, and then a handful of other Buffer teammates and peers.

Take-home exercise. During our interview process, we'll ask you to do an asynchronous task so we can see your work in practice and discuss it live.

Meet the CEO. Get to know Joel, our Founder CEO.

Collaboration period. Two paid days working with the team on a real project, so that we can each see what it's like to work together.

Read full description on the source site.