DevOps Engineer

# DevOps Engineer ## About the Role Knock is seeking a DevOps Engineer to join its small and growing platform team, responsible for building, scaling, and maintaining the core services and infrastructure that power the Knock platform. This role offers a high degree of ownership and autonomy, with a strong focus on service reliability, availability, scalability, performance, and security. As an early-stage company, you will contribute across infrastructure, developer experience, production systems, and internal engineering practices. You will work with Kubernetes, AWS, infrastructure as code, databases, queues, observability platforms, and deployment practices while partnering closely with product engineering teams in a fully distributed, remote-first environment. ## Key Responsibilities * Adopt, modernize, and maintain a Terraform-backed Amazon EKS cluster for elastic scale, reliability, performance, and security. * Troubleshoot and optimize PostgreSQL performance and queues at scale. * Develop scaling strategies capable of supporting significant future growth. * Identify and resolve scaling issues before they impact customers. * Improve telemetry and distributed tracing using Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, and Honeycomb. * Investigate and address observability blind spots, including making codebase changes when needed. * Maintain and improve Knock's greater-than-99.95% uptime track record. * Support product engineering teams in delivering customer value quickly. * Improve developer experience through practices such as canary deployments, faster cycle times, and blue/green deployments. * Participate in engineering on-call rotations. * Communicate infrastructure and operational improvements across the engineering team. * Create and maintain runbooks and internal documentation. ## Required Qualifications * 4+ years of experience as a DevOps Engineer or in a similar role within a startup or mid-sized company. * Experience working with complex systems operating at scale. * Experience working with production Kubernetes clusters and infrastructure as code. * Experience with Terraform or comparable infrastructure-as-code tools such as Pulumi or CloudFormation. * Experience with complex AWS deployments, including multi-account environments and VPC structures supporting EKS. * Experience with Amazon EKS. * Experience operating and scaling database technologies. * Significant experience with at least one of Aurora PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or ClickHouse. * Some experience or familiarity operating and scaling queues or streams such as SQS, Kinesis, Kafka, or similar technologies. * Strong problem-solving skills focused on reliability, scalability, and performance. * Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively in a fully distributed, remote-first team. ## Preferred Qualifications * Experience with Terraform specifically. * Experience with multiple database technologies, particularly Aurora PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and ClickHouse. * Broader experience with queue and streaming technologies such as SQS, Kinesis, and Kafka. * Experience with observability and telemetry platforms such as Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, and Honeycomb. * Experience with canary and blue/green deployment strategies. * Experience creating runbooks and long-form technical documentation. * Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar. ## Skills & Competencies * DevOps engineering * Kubernetes * Amazon EKS * AWS * Terraform * Infrastructure as Code * Multi-account AWS environments * VPC * PostgreSQL / Aurora PostgreSQL * MongoDB * ClickHouse * SQS * Kinesis * Kafka * Observability * Datadog * AWS CloudWatch * Honeycomb * Distributed tracing * Reliability engineering * Scalability and performance optimization * CI/CD and deployment practices * Canary deployments * Blue/green deployments * Troubleshooting * Developer experience * On-call operations * Technical documentation * Remote collaboration * AI-assisted development ## Education & Experience **Education:** Not specified in the source job description. **Experience:** 4+ years of experience as a DevOps Engineer or similar role in a startup or mid-sized company working with complex systems at scale. ## Work Arrangement & Schedule * **Work Arrangement:** Remote-first / fully distributed * **Location:** Knock has a New York City base; the source does not specify a geographic restriction for this role. * **On-Call:** Participation in an on-call rotation with the engineering team is required. * **Schedule:** On-call schedule is shared with the engineering team; specific hours are not specified. ## Compensation & Benefits Compensation and specific employee benefits are not specified in the source job description. ## Company & Team Knock is a Series A startup with 20+ employees focused on helping products communicate with their users through product notifications. The company is remote-first with a New York City base and follows an API-first approach. The platform team builds, scales, and maintains the infrastructure and core services that run Knock. The company emphasizes reliability, availability, inclusive collaboration, autonomy, and a culture of continuous improvement. ## AI at Knock Knock embraces AI tools in day-to-day engineering work and encourages experimentation with evolving AI-assisted workflows. Team members are expected to be familiar with tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar tools. These tools may be permitted during some portions of the interview process, while other portions may require candidates to work without them.