Engineering Manager, Infra/Systems

Convex•San Francisco, CA

3d•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. 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. Convex has assembled a team of engineers who have built and designed some of the largest backend 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. 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.

Requirements

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).
Deeply technical: opinions about technical decisions, ability to evaluate team's work, earn respect through judgment.
Develop people, not just ship software: give engineers real ownership, hold them to it, help them get better.
Understand the 'why': spend time to make sure the team understands the why, dig into disagreements.
Understand the demands of a user-facing live-site service: experience on OLTP databases over OLAP or offline systems.
Value simplicity and pragmatism: bias toward doing fewer things better, push back on unnecessary complexity, know when to ship.
Bring energy to the room: constructive, positive, and excited about making things better.
Worthy of trust: honest, advocate for the team, do the right thing when no one is watching.

Nice To Haves

Knowledge of Rust is a plus

Responsibilities

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.