Hi Buffer Team! 
The road to being an engineer on your growth marketing team started long before this job posting..
Origin
I started coding in 2006.
MySpace and Neopets were my first frontend development teachers. I'd later take those skills and land my first freelance client through the Newgrounds forums at 13. By high school, I was pulling in $15,000 a year making websites for local businesses during the Groupon boom. I was obsessed with the internet and couldn't stop building.
Growth Entrepreneur
In college, I got really good at SEO.
From my dorm room, I was running hundreds of link building split tests to figure out what ranking signals worked best for Google. That led to me becoming a top HostGator affiliate, ranking for search terms like “how to build a website” that had 70,000+ searches a month, and building a coupon website that dominated highly targeted coupon terms.
This led to a decade of being self-employed as a digital marketer. I was identifying arbitrage opportunities, building landing pages, running conversion optimizations, and driving traffic through organic SEO. It taught me a lot about driving results beyond vanity metrics, because when you're working solo, the only thing that matters is whether it actually works!
Audience Builder
I even spent time as a social creator.
There is a special place in my heart for social influencers because at one point, I was one. While I had been making YouTube videos since I was a kid, when Musical.ly came around, I saw a real opportunity. In six months, I grew an account from 0 to 200,000 followers. It taught me a lot about what it takes to grow an audience and consistently create content. I also had a silly little video of me dancing around in a shark costume go viral (you can Google Shark-ira if you’re curious). That period of my life was really fun, but it was also really stressful, and it taught me that being an influencer wasn't my path. So I packed up my bags and moved back to where I thrived.
NextJS Frontend Engineer
Now I'm a Next.js developer in EdTech.
About four years ago, I dedicated myself to sharpening my development skills and landed a frontend developer job at Anthology (now Blackboard) in the EdTech space. One of the projects I was tasked with was taking their site that was originally built in Drupal and rebuilding the entire thing from scratch in a headless Next.js setup. Every component, every page, zero code carried over. Drupal stayed as the backend, and I was pulling everything through REST APIs to power the new frontend.
Those are my favorite kinds of projects. The goal is well-defined, but the journey to get there requires solving hundreds of small problems to clear the path. That's where I thrive, and honestly, it's the part I love most about this work.
Here’s what that looked like in practice:
AI Builder
AI development workflows are entirely changing the way I work.
Over the last three years, LLMs have fundamentally changed my role as a developer. Today, I spend more time articulating what needs to be built and reviewing code than writing it line by line. Over the last several years, I’ve embraced how my job as an engineer has become more about being a higher-level architect who can think through problems clearly.
While my bread and butter has always been frontend (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), AI workflows have enabled me to build internal tools in Python, native macOS apps in Swift, and projects with full database backends.
As a lifelong learner, AI has also changed how I grow. I learn by asking a million questions, so if I don’t understand how something works, I no longer have to scour the internet hoping someone wrote a great blog post that answers my curiosities. It’s an interactive experience now, and nothing has accelerated my learning as much as that.
Joining Your Team
Will you be my valentine?
Ever since I rejoined the engineering world, I’ve had Buffer’s careers page bookmarked in my browser, just waiting for the timing to be right. As soon as I saw this job posting, I knew that time had come. I hope we get to talk soon and learn more about each other.