Director of Engineering
Knit
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.