Engineering Manager, API/Product

Job description

Application demands are rapidly changing while the experience to design and operate infrastructure is rapidly diminishing. A new platform abstraction is needed to support agentic development, agentic applications, and an entirely new set of application workloads. We think Convex is the team and platform best placed to define this abstraction. Designing the platform, APIs, and frameworks for the future of application development is a difficult challenge. It requires a strong understanding of developer needs as well as the constraints that lead to applications that stay simple, correct, and secure over time. Building and leading the teams that make this possible is still the domain of very talented humans, and we want you to be one of them. The Team: https://convex.dev/about-us Convex has assembled a team of engineers who have built and designed some of the largest platforms in the world, with exabytes of data, millions of transactions per second, and shipped desktop and mobile software onto billions of devices. We are a group of friendly, collaborative, and passionate people that love working in-person together in our office in San Francisco. We hire primarily in SF but have a few experienced folks working remotely in certain situations. The Role: We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the teams that shape the Convex developer (and agent) experience. It's an ambitious and fast-moving mandate that spans a large surface area, from our development APIs, to agent frameworks, to integrations, to the component system that makes Convex effortless to build with. The unifying goal is simple to say and hard to do: be the best platform for developers, for building agents, and for agentic development. This isn't a role where you hand off the technical work and manage from above. You'll help engineers understand why they're building what they're building, give them real ownership, and develop their judgment on how good something needs to be before it ships, all while staying in the architecture discussions and decisions about what to build and why. If you want to build a team that holds itself to a standard where 'it technically works' is never the finish line, you're going to like it here. What You’ll Do: - Manage and grow the teams spanning our product experience, giving engineers real ownership and holding them to a high bar. - Develop a strong understanding of what developers and agents need from Convex and use it to make tradeoffs between competing priorities. - Work closely with our CTO and product lead to align the teams on priorities and make sure we're building the right things at the right time. - Stay hands-on technically, contributing to architecture decisions, code review, and technical direction. - Design, build, and maintain the developer-facing surfaces of Convex alongside the teams. - Give direct feedback and have hard conversations when they're needed. - Occasionally put up with James asking if there's a simpler more elegant solution to a problem. What Excites Us: - Deep experience building and shipping high-quality developer-facing products or tools, ideally at a technical or developer tools company. - A track record of growing engineers and building strong teams, not just shipping software. - Genuine interest in how AI is changing the way software gets built, and a point of view on what developers and agents need from a platform like Convex. - Strong product sensibility and taste. You care about closing the gap between something that works and something that's a genuine pleasure to use. - Comfort with prioritization and tradeoffs across a broad surface area, and the judgment to know what matters for customers and what matters for the business. - Experience working in fast-moving environments where requirements shift and many of the hardest problems are not fully specified upfront. - Interest in working in-person at Convex's office in SF. IDEAL CHARACTERISTICS This is an attempt to outline some characteristics of engineering managers who tend to thrive at Convex. We have a high demand for conceptual thought and architectural sensibilities, while also having the typical demands of a small startup. ARE THEY DEEPLY TECHNICAL? The best engineering managers we've worked with never really stopped being engineers. They have opinions about technical decisions, they can actually evaluate the work their team is doing, and they earn respect through judgment rather than a title on an org chart. If you can't get deep in the weeds with the team, you're going to have a hard time leading engineers who live there. DO THEY DEVELOP PEOPLE, NOT JUST SHIP SOFTWARE? The job here isn't to be the best engineer on the team or to review every line of code. It's to give engineers real ownership, hold them to it, and help them get better over time. Sometimes that means stepping in, sometimes it means getting out of the way, and sometimes it means having a hard conversation nobody wants to have. A good manager knows the difference and takes responsibility for the team's outcomes either way. DO THEY DO IT FOR THE WHY? At Convex, "my manager told me to" is not a satisfactory answer to why we're building something, even if the manager is the CTO. Engineers here don't just do things because they're told, they do them because they believe in them. A great EM spends the time to make sure the team understands the why, and when there's a disagreement, digs into the root of it rather than pulling rank. ARE THEY OBSESSED WITH CRAFT? Craft is the difference between something that technically works and something people actually love to use, and it's most of what separates a good developer platform from a great one. We want a manager who sweats the details most people would let slide, holds a high bar for how things feel to build with, and can pull that same standard out of the engineers around them. DO THEY VALUE SIMPLICITY AND PRAGMATISM? Simplicity is at the heart of all good systems, and it turns out it's at the heart of good engineering leadership too. We want someone with a bias toward doing fewer things better, who pushes back on unnecessary complexity, and who knows when to tell the team to stop gold-plating something and just ship it because we're a startup and need to move. DO THEY BRING ENERGY TO THE ROOM? Startups are hard. Building something from nothing is hard. Driving forward progress despite uncertainty is hard. Shitting on stuff is easy and just brings everyone else down. We have a high bar for quality but also a high bar for being constructive, positive, and excited about making things better. We're meant to be having fun here. ARE THEY WORTHY OF TRUST? Integrity underlies everything we do at Convex, and for a manager it matters even more. The team needs to trust that you'll be honest with them, go to bat for them, and do the right thing when no one is watching. Trust is hard to build and easy to destroy. We want someone who treats it as a way of life, not something you switch on when people are looking. The salary range for this full-time position is > $280,000 + equity + benefits