Engineering Manager, Infra/Systems

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. Building infrastructure that’s fast, reliable, and designed to make good architecture easy and bad architecture hard is a difficult challenge. Building and leading the team that architects this platform 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 our infra team, someone who is still very much an engineer. The team owns the database, the sync layer, and the newer primitives like branching and analytics that we're building out as they take shape, and a lot of this work has no playbook because we're the ones writing it. If you have a deep background in distributed systems and care about making the people around you better, we'd love to talk. This isn't a role for someone who wants to step back from the technical work. You'll be working alongside the team on hard systems problems, contributing to architecture and code review, and working closely with our CTO on some of the most important technical decisions at the company. The leadership side is equally important: helping engineers think deeply about why they're building what they're building and giving them real ownership of hard problems. If you like the idea of guiding an engineer through designing a new storage layer, or helping the team set aside an interesting problem for a week to land something simple and pragmatic because we're a startup and need to ship, you're going to like it here. What You'll Do: - Manage and grow the Infra team, giving engineers real ownership of hard problems and holding them to a high bar. - Work closely with our CTO to align the team on priorities and make sure we're working on the right things at the right time. - Stay hands-on technically, contributing to architecture decisions, code review, and technical direction. - Design, build, and maintain Convex's global cloud infrastructure alongside the team. - Investigate and improve the performance and reliability of our systems. - Help establish technical direction and engineering standards as Convex grows. - 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 knowledge of distributed systems and operating infrastructure at scale, including owning systems through major scale transitions or building core infrastructure from scratch. - A track record of growing engineers and building strong teams, not just shipping software. - Strong systems judgment: understanding tradeoffs and knowing when to keep systems simple versus when to invest in complexity. - 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. - Ability to write high quality code (knowledge of Rust is a plus, but you'll figure it out). 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. DO THEY UNDERSTAND THE DEMANDS OF A USER-FACING LIVE-SITE SERVICE? We generally weigh experience on OLTP databases over OLAP or offline systems. Not just because it's more relevant but because it comes with a mindset: the system absolutely must work because there's a real user-facing application on the other side. A good infra manager has felt that weight themselves and knows how to build a team that takes it seriously, keeps a high bar for reliability, and builds simple well-abstracted systems that are less likely to fail in the first place. 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