Engineering Manager, Platform

About the role

We are a remote-first (with a NYC base) Series A startup of 20+ employees that believe in the power of great software. We are APIs all the way down at Knock—Stripe for payments, Algolia for search, WorkOS for SSO. We are excited to add Knock to that list and to push forward the API-first movement.

What You’ll Be Doing In This Role

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Leading and participating in incident response—debugging production issues, running postmortems, and driving reliability improvements off the back of them.
• 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.
• Helping shape Knock’s broader engineering culture, standards, and tooling choices alongside the CTO.

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.
• A strong technical foundation to own an inherently deeply technical area of our service.
• The ability to make 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.