Engineer 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 engineers

Own execution and delivery across Platform projects

Set clear priorities, break down ambiguous projects, and ensure projects move from design through production

Run effective technical planning, design reviews, and engineering reviews

Coach senior and junior engineers and help raise the technical bar across the team

Partner closely with the Head of Engineering on platform strategy, architecture, hiring, and organizational priorities

Identify execution risks early and take ownership of resolving them

Hands-On Engineering

Design and build production backend and platform systems alongside the team

Take direct ownership of technically difficult or high-priority projects when needed

Review architecture, code, infrastructure changes, and technical designs

Debug complex production and distributed-system issues

Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance speed, reliability, scalability, and maintainability

Establish patterns and technical standards that other engineers can build on

Platform & Infrastructure

Own the reliability, scalability, and performance of Knowtex's backend platform

Design systems capable of supporting rapidly growing clinical workloads

Improve observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response

Own cloud infrastructure and help improve security, cost efficiency, and operational resilience

Build shared services and infrastructure that allow product engineers to move faster

Drive improvements to developer experience, deployment workflows, testing, and engineering productivity

Identify and eliminate technical bottlenecks before they become scaling problems

AI & Data Infrastructure

Partner closely with ML engineers and researchers to productionize new AI capabilities

Build infrastructure for model inference, evaluation, experimentation, and data processing

Support applied ML initiatives that currently live within the Platform organization

Help establish scalable technical foundations for Knowtex's growing ML organization

Design systems that balance AI quality with latency, reliability, scalability, and cost

Required Qualifications

7+ years of professional software engineering experience

Previous experience directly 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 meaningful 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 and ability to work across engineering, product, ML, and business teams

Preferred Qualifications

Experience managing a Platform, Infrastructure, Backend, or Developer Infrastructure team

Staff-level or equivalent technical experience prior to or alongside engineering management

Experience with Python and modern backend frameworks

Experience with AWS services such as Lambda, ECS/EKS, SQS, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudWatch, or related technologies

Experience operating event-driven or asynchronous distributed systems

Experience building systems with strict latency and reliability requirements

Experience with containers, infrastructure-as-code, and modern CI/CD systems

Experience building data infrastructure or large-scale processing pipelines

Experience supporting ML systems, model inference, LLM applications, or AI infrastructure

Experience in healthcare technology or other regulated environments

Experience with HIPAA-compliant systems and healthcare data

Experience 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 direction

Engineers can execute independently without requiring constant escalation to senior leadership

Critical backend and infrastructure projects are delivered predictably

Platform reliability and scalability improve as Knowtex grows

Production issues are detected and resolved quickly, with recurring problems systematically eliminated

Product and ML teams can move faster because the underlying platform provides strong abstractions and infrastructure

You 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

AWS

Python

Distributed backend systems

Event-driven and asynchronous architectures

Relational and NoSQL databases

Containers and cloud infrastructure

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD and automated deployment

Observability, monitoring, and incident response

LLM and ML inference pipelines

Large-scale clinical data processing

HIPAA-compliant production environments

Compensation & Benefits

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity compensation

Unlimited PTO

Premium health, dental, and vision coverage

401(k) plan

Work model: Hybrid In-person (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in office in SF)