Team: Engineering

Reports To: CTO

Location: New York City, NY. This role is expected to be largely in-person and work from our NYC office.

Supervisory Responsibility: This is a pivotal leadership role. You will directly supervise 2 Tech Leads from our offshore development team (~25 members), and will hire and directly supervise all members of the new NYC-based engineering team.

Travel: US & international travel required a few times per year, specifically to cities where we have team pods: NYC, Chicago, DC, Delhi, and Ahmedabad.

A little about us…

Knit is an AI-native consumer research platform helping brands automate and accelerate primary research. With our Researcher-Driven AI, we condense the entire quant+qual research process from weeks into days (sometimes hours!) for 50+ leading enterprise brands - including Amazon, Mars, NASCAR, JBL, and the WNBA. We’ve grown 500%+ in the last 12 months, and we’re just getting started. 

We believe AI is the key to scaling and democratizing great research. From automatically generating surveys, to analyzing both quant & qual data at scale, to creating stakeholder-ready reports - our platform is changing the way insights teams operate - and we need you to help us push the limits of what’s possible.

Overview | Your Mission

This is a pivotal leadership opportunity where you'll drive impact across three critical areas:

1. Build an Elite Engineering Hub in NYC: Attract A-players, establish a high-velocity, squad-based team structure, and cultivate a culture of innovation and technical excellence from the ground up.
2. Drive Technical & AI Vision: Serve as a key technical architect and strategic partner to Product, designing and building the category-defining AI platform that revolutionizes how brands understand consumers.
3. Lead & Transition: While building the core NYC team, you'll effectively manage and optimize our current offshore outsourced engineering team, guiding the strategic transition towards an in-house model.

As a key leader, you will shape our technical and AI roadmap alongside the CTO, Director of Product, and Head of AI, ensuring engineering efforts align with business goals and deliver high-quality results.

Responsibilities | Outcomes you will own

Build & Lead the NYC Engineering Hub:

• Attract, hire, onboard, and mentor the foundational engineering team, setting a high bar for talent and cultural fit.
• Define the initial US team structure (pods), roles, and responsibilities, fostering collaboration and ownership.
• Champion a culture of technical growth, inclusion, and high performance aligned with Knit's values.
• Oversee resource allocation for engineering efforts, contributing to budget planning and advocating for the tools, training, and infrastructure needed for success.

Establish High-Velocity Engineering Practices:

• Implement and refine lean, effective agile methodologies optimized for speed and learning across all engineering teams.
• Define and track key engineering metrics (e.g., deployment frequency, velocity) to drive continuous improvement and reduce time-to-market.
• Champion the use of AI tools in the development lifecycle to achieve ultimate productivity.
• Establish robust CI/CD pipelines, automated testing strategies, monitoring, and operational best practices for quality and reliability.

Drive Technical Strategy & Architecture:

• Collaborate closely with the CTO, Product, and AI leaders to architect Knit's scalable, reliable, and secure technical foundation for Enterprise users. 
• Proactively communicate engineering strategy, progress, risks, and resource needs, ensuring alignment with company objectives and effectively managing expectations upwards.
• Make pragmatic technology choices, drive the technical roadmap, and clearly communicate trade-offs.
• Champion technical excellence, establish coding standards, lead insightful code reviews, and manage technical debt strategically.

Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Build a tight, collaborative partnership with Product and AI, acting as a strategic business partner to deeply understand customer needs and translate them into robust technical solutions.
• Collaborate with customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, customer success) to ensure engineering is aligned with customer needs and company goals.
• Bring a constructive, systems-thinking lens to cross-functional discussions - always pushing us to move faster and smarter.
• Ensure seamless communication across time zones, technical alignment, and knowledge sharing between all R&D teams.

Manage, Optimize & Transition Offshore Team:

• Provide clear direction, oversight, and performance management for the existing outsourced team in India.
• Identify and implement immediate improvements to enhance their velocity and quality.
• Develop and execute a phased plan to transition responsibilities and knowledge.

Required Skills & Experiences | Who You Are

• 10+ years in technology with 4+ years in engineering leadership, including proven success building and scaling teams (20+) from the ground up in early-stage AI SaaS environments (Seed/Series A+).
• Strong architectural foundation and hands-on ability. Comfortable diving deep into code reviews, system design, and complex problem-solving. Proven experience architecting, building, and scaling complex, reliable, and secure AI-driven SaaS platforms.
• Direct experience managing or closely collaborating with globally distributed teams (specifically India), including optimizing performance and managing outsourced/offshore vendor relationships. Experience with prioritizing technical debt and modernizing codebases.
• Ability to define technical strategy and Engineering OKRs aligned with business objectives. You think like a business owner while remaining hands-on to guide execution effectively.
• Expertise in establishing and optimizing agile development processes, CI/CD pipelines, designing and optimizing data pipelines for real-time and batch processing, and operational best practices within a startup context. Proven ability to partner effectively with Product.
• Strong grounding in modern cloud-native technologies similar to ours (e.g., Python, React.js, NoSQL like MongoDB, AWS, Microservices). Technical depth is critical.
• Proficiency in enterprise-grade security (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR), performance optimization (e.g., Kubernetes, caching), and experimentation frameworks (e.g., A/B testing, feature flagging).
• Outstanding ability to articulate vision, strategy, and technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences (technical/non-technical, junior/executive).

Bonus Points

• Direct experience building Gen AI-powered products and data-intensive SaaS platforms.

• Experience leading or significantly contributing to transitions from outsourced to in-house engineering models.
• Experience in market research or an analogous industry
   

Benefits

Join Knit and be part of building the future of market research! We offer:

• Competitive salary and equity options
• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
• 401(k) plan
• Access to Industrious offices worldwide as part of our company membership
• A company laptop and an onboarding technology stipend
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Opportunity to make a foundational impact at a rapidly growing, AI-native startup.

Our Core Values

We are building a Championship Team. This means we:

• Play to win: We set audacious goals and push ourselves to achieve them with a bias towards action  (When we see a need, we take initiative, and hold ourselves accountable to seeing it through).
• Are 1% better every day: We approach situations with a growth mindset and ask, “How can we make the business better?” and “What would it take?”.
• Keep the main thing the main thing: Identify what has the biggest impact and prioritize to focus on it.