Platform Engineering Manager

Knock•New York, NY

4d•Remote

About The Position

Knock is seeking a Platform Engineering Manager to lead its growing platform team. This team is responsible for building, scaling, and maintaining the core services and infrastructure that power Knock. As the first engineering manager hire, this role reports directly to the CTO and offers significant ownership and autonomy over the team's roadmap, personnel, and operational practices. The company emphasizes reliability and availability, seeking a leader to enhance these aspects. Knock is committed to building an inclusive, equitable, and diverse team, and encourages applications from underrepresented communities. The company values individuals who can contribute new ideas and perspectives, even if they don't perfectly match the listed qualifications.

Requirements

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 a deeply technical area of the service.
Capable of making strong technical contributions.
A track record of hiring, growing, and retaining excellent engineers.
Experience building team cultures where people do their best work.
The judgment to delegate decision making and expertise to the team.
Comfort owning prioritization without a dedicated Product Manager partner.
Experience leading on-call rotations, incident response, and operational maturity for high-availability services.
Experience with fast-growing, well-structured engineering organizations.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to work in a fully distributed, remote-first team.
Familiarity with AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar.

Nice To Haves

Pragmatism in balancing platform investments against feature delivery.
Instincts to know when to step in to move a decision along.
Pragmatic enough to know when to drop things to get high-priority work done.
Bringing strong ideas from experience with fast-growing, well-structured engineering organizations, without following them as dogma.
Willingness to write long-form documents.
Willingness to experiment with AI tools and share learnings.

Responsibilities

Hiring and building a high-performing platform team, growing it from its current size to 2-4 additional ICs.
Owning the platform team’s roadmap and prioritization, balancing platform investments (reliability, scalability, developer experience) against feature delivery.
Coaching and developing engineers through 1-on-1s, stretch projects, and consequential decisions.
Contributing to architecture decisions and design reviews for platform services and infrastructure, and writing code strategically.
Leading and participating in incident response, including debugging production issues, running postmortems, and driving reliability improvements.
Partnering with the product engineering team to manage cross-team dependencies, establish support models, and define SLAs and metrics.
Helping shape Knock’s broader engineering culture, standards, and tooling choices.
Setting direction and raising standards for the platform team while ensuring the team is brought along and is accountable for outcomes and culture.