Engineering Manager, Platform

About Knowtex Knowtex is building the future of voice AI operating systems for clinicians, transforming how healthcare documentation happens at the point of care. We are experiencing rapid growth across both commercial health systems and federal healthcare, with our ambient documentation platform scaling to thousands of clinicians across hundreds of specialties. We are at an inflection point where advances in speech, language models, and clinical AI can fundamentally change how clinicians interact with technology, giving them more time to focus on what matters most: their patients. Position Overview We are hiring an Engineering Manager, Platform to lead the team responsible for the backend systems, infrastructure, and shared technical foundations that power Knowtex. This is a highly hands-on engineering leadership role. We are looking for someone who has successfully managed engineers before but still wants to design systems, write production code, review architecture, debug difficult problems, and directly contribute to critical projects. The Platform team owns core backend services, cloud infrastructure, reliability, scalability, data systems, and shared engineering capabilities used across Knowtex's products. The team also currently owns several applied ML engineering initiatives and works closely with our growing ML organization. You will report directly to the Head of Engineering and own both the technical direction and day-to-day execution of the Platform team. This is not a pure people-management role. You should be comfortable moving between managing engineers, setting technical direction, and personally jumping into the highest-priority engineering problems. Key Responsibilities Engineering Leadership Lead, manage, and develop a team of platform and backend engineersOwn execution and delivery across Platform projectsSet clear priorities, break down ambiguous projects, and ensure projects move from design through productionRun effective technical planning, design reviews, and engineering reviewsCoach senior and junior engineers and help raise the technical bar across the teamPartner closely with the Head of Engineering on platform strategy, architecture, hiring, and organizational prioritiesIdentify execution risks early and take ownership of resolving them Hands-On Engineering Design and build production backend and platform systems alongside the teamTake direct ownership of technically difficult or high-priority projects when neededReview architecture, code, infrastructure changes, and technical designsDebug complex production and distributed-system issuesMake pragmatic architectural decisions that balance speed, reliability, scalability, and maintainabilityEstablish patterns and technical standards that other engineers can build on Platform & Infrastructure Own the reliability, scalability, and performance of Knowtex's backend platformDesign systems capable of supporting rapidly growing clinical workloadsImprove observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident responseOwn cloud infrastructure and help improve security, cost efficiency, and operational resilienceBuild shared services and infrastructure that allow product engineers to move fasterDrive improvements to developer experience, deployment workflows, testing, and engineering productivityIdentify and eliminate technical bottlenecks before they become scaling problems AI & Data Infrastructure Partner closely with ML engineers and researchers to productionize new AI capabilitiesBuild infrastructure for model inference, evaluation, experimentation, and data processingSupport applied ML initiatives that currently live within the Platform organizationHelp establish scalable technical foundations for Knowtex's growing ML organizationDesign systems that balance AI quality with latency, reliability, scalability, and cost Required Qualifications 7+ years of professional software engineering experiencePrevious experience directly managing a software engineering teamStrong hands-on backend engineering experience and willingness to continue writing production codeDeep experience designing and operating distributed backend systemsStrong system design and software architecture skillsExperience building production systems on AWS or another major cloud platformExperience owning production systems with meaningful scale, reliability, and availability requirementsStrong understanding of databases, APIs, asynchronous systems, queues, caching, and distributed architecturesExperience with infrastructure, observability, deployment systems, and production operationsDemonstrated ability to lead complex technical projects from ambiguity through productionAbility to effectively manage both senior and junior engineersStrong communication skills and ability to work across engineering, product, ML, and business teams Preferred Qualifications Experience managing a Platform, Infrastructure, Backend, or Developer Infrastructure teamStaff-level or equivalent technical experience prior to or alongside engineering managementExperience with Python and modern backend frameworksExperience with AWS services such as Lambda, ECS/EKS, SQS, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudWatch, or related technologiesExperience operating event-driven or asynchronous distributed systemsExperience building systems with strict latency and reliability requirementsExperience with containers, infrastructure-as-code, and modern CI/CD systemsExperience building data infrastructure or large-scale processing pipelinesExperience supporting ML systems, model inference, LLM applications, or AI infrastructureExperience in healthcare technology or other regulated environmentsExperience with HIPAA-compliant systems and healthcare dataExperience working in fast-moving startup environments where engineering leaders remain deeply involved in execution What Success Looks Like The Platform team has clear ownership, priorities, and technical directionEngineers can execute independently without requiring constant escalation to senior leadershipCritical backend and infrastructure projects are delivered predictablyPlatform reliability and scalability improve as Knowtex growsProduction issues are detected and resolved quickly, with recurring problems systematically eliminatedProduct and ML teams can move faster because the underlying platform provides strong abstractions and infrastructureYou remain technically close enough to the systems to make high-quality engineering decisions while building a team that can operate effectively without depending on you for every decision Technical Environment AWSPythonDistributed backend systemsEvent-driven and asynchronous architecturesRelational and NoSQL databasesContainers and cloud infrastructureInfrastructure as codeCI/CD and automated deploymentObservability, monitoring, and incident responseLLM and ML inference pipelinesLarge-scale clinical data processingHIPAA-compliant production environments Compensation & Benefits Competitive salaryMeaningful equity compensationUnlimited PTOPremium health, dental, and vision coverage401(k) planWork model: Hybrid In-person (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in office in SF)