Engineering Manager, Platform

About Knock

Knock is on a mission to help products communicate with their users in a more thoughtful way. Building product notifications in-house takes months often leading to poor user experiences. We believe thatwhen done rightproduct notifications help users find value in the products they use every day. Thats why we built Knock.

Were a remote-first (with a NYC base) Series A startup of 20 employees that believe in the power of great software. Were APIs all the way down at KnockStripe for payments Algolia for search WorkOS for SSO. Were excited to add Knock to that list and to push forward the API-first movement. If you are too come join us and lets build something great together.

Were backed by top investors and operators including Craft Ventures Afore Capital Preface Ventures Worklife Capital Guillermo Rauch (CEO/Founder @ Vercel) Scott Belsky (CPO @ Adobe) Adam Gross (CEO @ Heroku) John Kodumal (CTO @ LaunchDarkly) Nate Stewart (CPO @ Cockroach Labs) Charley Ma and Zach Holman to name a few.

About the role

Were looking for a Platform Engineering Manager to lead our small but growing platform team. The platform team at Knock are responsible for building scaling and maintaining the core services and infrastructure that run Knock.

This is the first engineering manager hire were making at Knock and this person will report directly to Chris our CTO. You will have a high degree of ownership and autonomy over the platform teams roadmap the people on it and how we operate. Were an engineer-led team that obsesses over the reliability and availability of our service and were looking for a leader who will help us raise that bar even further.

We care deeply about building a team and culture that is inclusive and equitable for people of all backgrounds and experiences and believe firmly that the best teams are diverse. We particularly encourage people from underrepresented communities to apply.

Last thing: you can be a great fit even if you dont perfectly match whats described below. We know theres a lot we dont know and havent thought of yet and were looking for teammates that can tell us what those things are. If thats you dont hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself!

What youll be doing in this role

As an early stage company everyone (including you) is involved in building every part of the company from the product and the infrastructure that it runs on to how we get work done internally. Here are a collection of hats we need you to be OK with wearing:

1. Hiring and building a high-performing platform team over the next year identifying engineers who can balance craft with pragmatism and growing the team from where it is today to 24 additional ICs.

2. Owning the platform teams roadmap and prioritization making sure were aimed at the highest-priority business problems and balancing platform investments (reliability scalability developer experience) against feature delivery.

3. Coaching and developing the engineers on the team through regular 1-on-1s stretch projects and consequential decisionsrewarding outputs and impact not inputs or theater.

4. Contributing to architecture decisions and design reviews for our platform services and infrastructure and writing code strategically to unblock critical paths and set standards through example.

5. Leading and participating in incident responsedebugging production issues running postmortems and driving reliability improvements off the back of them.

6. Partnering with the product engineering team to manage cross-team dependencies establish support models and define the SLAs and metrics that actually measure platform success.

7. Helping shape Knocks broader engineering culture standards and tooling choices alongside the CTO.

This position is both high autonomy and high accountability: you will have a lot of room to set direction and raise our standards while also bringing the rest of the team along for the ride and being accountable for the teams outcomes and culture.

What were looking for in this role

• 3 years of experience as an engineering manager in a startup or mid-sized company leading a platform or infrastructure team that operates at scale.

• Strong technical foundations to own an inherently deeply technical area of our service. You should be capable of making strong technical contributions even though you should seldom be spending time doing so.

• A track record of hiring growing and retaining excellent engineers and of building team cultures where people do their best work.

• The judgment to delegate decision making and expertise to the team and the instincts to know when to step in to move a decision along.

• Comfort owning prioritization without a dedicated Product Manager partnerable to say no to protect the teams focus but pragmatic enough to know when to drop things to get high-priority work done.

• Experience leading on-call rotations incident response and the operational maturity that comes with running a high-availability service.

• Enough experience with fast-growing well-structured engineering organizations to bring strong ideas in without following any of them as dogma.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to work in a fully distributed remote-first team. We love to write long-form documents for us our future selves and our AI companions.

A note on AI at Knock

Were a team that has fully embraced AI tools to help us in our day-to-day. We use these tools to accelerate us but remain clear-eyed about where they shine and where the pitfalls lie.

Were not overly prescriptive about the tools you can use and we encourage experimentation as we embrace this new method of working. We have a collaborative culture of figuring out together what works and what doesnt sharing what weve learned comparing notes and iterating on our workflows as the tooling landscape evolves. Were not overly prescriptive about the tools you can use in your day-to-day.

As a member of the Knock team we expect you to be familiar with tools like Cursor Claude Code Codex or similar to assist you in your job. Youll be allowed to use these tools in some parts of your interview loop but there will be times where well ask that you refrain.

Required Experience:

Manager