Engineering Manager, Platform

Job description

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 that—when done right—product notifications help users find value in the products they use every day. That’s why we built Knock. We're a remote-first (with a NYC base) Series A startup of 20+ employees that believe in the power of great software. We're APIs all the way down at Knock—Stripe for payments, Algolia for search, WorkOS for SSO. We're excited to add Knock to that list and to push forward the API-first movement. If you are, too, come join us and let's build something great together. We’re 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 We’re 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 we’re 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 team’s roadmap, the people on it, and how we operate. We’re an engineer-led team that obsesses over the reliability and availability of our service, and we’re 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 don't perfectly match what's described below. We know there's a lot we don't know and haven't thought of yet, and we're looking for teammates that can tell us what those things are. If that's you, don't hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself! WHAT YOU’LL 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 2–4 additional ICs. 2. Owning the platform team’s roadmap and prioritization, making sure we’re 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 decisions—rewarding 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 response—debugging 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 Knock’s 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 team’s outcomes and culture. WHAT WE’RE 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 partner—able to say no to protect the team’s 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 We’re 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. We’re 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 doesn’t — sharing what we’ve learned, comparing notes, and iterating on our workflows as the tooling landscape evolves. We’re 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. You’ll be allowed to use these tools in some parts of your interview loop, but there will be times where we’ll ask that you refrain.