Engineering Manager, Platform — Backend & AI Infra Leader

Knowtex; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Premium health, dental, and vision

401(k) plan

Hybrid in-person in SF

Job summary

Knowtex is seeking an Engineering Manager, Platform in San Francisco to lead the Platform team's backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and shared foundations. You will combine management with hands-on coding, architecture review, and critical problem solving, reporting to the Head of Engineering.

You will design scalable platform services, guide engineers, and partner with ML teams to productionize AI capabilities while ensuring reliability, observability, and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Direct experience managing a software engineering team.
• Strong hands-on backend engineering experience and willingness to continue writing production code.
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed backend systems.
• Strong system design and software architecture skills.
• Experience building production systems on AWS or another major cloud platform.
• Experience owning production systems with scale, reliability, and availability requirements.
• Strong understanding of databases, APIs, asynchronous systems, queues, caching, and distributed architectures.
• Experience with infrastructure, observability, deployment systems, and production operations.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical projects from ambiguity through production.
• Ability to effectively manage both senior and junior engineers.
• Strong communication skills across engineering, product, ML, and business teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, and develop a team of platform and backend engineers.
• Own execution and delivery across Platform projects, from design through production.
• Set clear priorities and decompose ambiguous projects for delivery.
• Run technical planning, design reviews, and engineering reviews.
• Coach engineers and raise technical bar across the team.
• Partner with Head of Engineering on platform strategy, architecture, hiring, and priorities.
• Identify execution risks early and resolve them.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Team leadership

System design

AWS / cloud

Python

APIs & services

Production systems

Job description

Knowtex is seeking an Engineering Manager, Platform in San Francisco to lead the Platform team's backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and shared foundations. You will combine management with hands-on coding, architecture review, and critical problem solving, reporting to the Head of Engineering.

You will design scalable platform services, guide engineers, and partner with ML teams to productionize AI capabilities while ensuring reliability, observability, and cost efficiency.