Engineering Manager, Platform - Knock

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.

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.

What you’ll be doing in this role

• Hiring & Building: Growing the platform team over the next year from where it is today to 2–4 additional ICs.
• Roadmap Ownership: Owning prioritization, balancing platform investments (reliability, scalability, developer experience) against feature delivery.
• Coaching & Mentoring: Developing engineers through 1-on-1s, stretch projects, and consequential decisions, rewarding outputs and impact.
• Technical Contribution: Contributing to architecture decisions, design reviews, and writing code strategically to unblock critical paths.
• Incident Response: Leading and participating in incident response, debugging production issues, running postmortems, and driving reliability improvements.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partnering with product engineering to manage dependencies, establish support models, and define SLAs and success metrics.
• Culture & Standards: Shaping 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 at scale.
• Strong technical foundations to own an inherently deeply technical area of our service.
• A track record of hiring, growing, and retaining excellent engineers.
• Good judgment to delegate decision making while knowing when to step in.
• Comfort owning prioritization without a dedicated Product Manager partner.
• Experience leading on-call rotations, incident response, and operational maturity.
• Strong communication skills for a fully distributed, remote-first team.