Engineering Manager, API/Product

Convex•San Francisco, CA

6d•Onsite

About The Position

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: 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.

Requirements

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.
Deeply technical: Have opinions about technical decisions, can evaluate the work their team is doing, and earn respect through judgment.
Develop people, not just ship software: Give engineers real ownership, hold them to it, and help them get better over time.
Do it for the why: Spend the time to make sure the team understands the why, and when there's a disagreement, dig into the root of it rather than pulling rank.
Obsessed with craft: Sweat the details most people would let slide, hold a high bar for how things feel to build with, and can pull that same standard out of the engineers around them.
Value simplicity and pragmatism: Bias toward doing fewer things better, push back on unnecessary complexity, and know when to tell the team to stop gold-plating something and just ship it.
Bring energy to the room: Be constructive, positive, and excited about making things better.
Worthy of trust: Be honest with the team, go to bat for them, and do the right thing when no one is watching.

Responsibilities

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.