Quick Summary
Knak is a mission-driven company focused on empowering people to be creative. We are a world-class enterprise email and landing page creation platform, providing marketers with an incredibly powerful, yet easy-to-use solution. Our industry-leading SaaS platform, built by marketers for marketers, enhances efficiency, improves campaign conversion rates, and ensures brand consistency. We also believe in having fun while we work!
Our Engineering Team:
At Knak, we build groundbreaking software used by marketers at many of the world's top companies. Our engineering culture is transparent, collaborative, and blameless, emphasizing continuous learning and encouraging experimentation to solve problems and help customers. We are a small but rapidly growing team, offering numerous opportunities to grow and hone skills across our entire tech stack. We believe in equipping ourselves with the best tools, technologies, and processes to build great software.
The Role
We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to bridge the gap between internal teams and software development. In this role, you will collaborate closely with internal teams and the DevOps team to design, build, and optimize internal tools and workflows that enable AI efficiency across the organization. You will leverage your full-stack development skills and cloud infrastructure expertise to create reliable, scalable systems that empower our internal teams to do their best work.
Responsibilities
- Enable AI Efficiency: Partner with cross-functional internal teams and DevOps to conceptualize, build, and deploy internal tools and workflows that leverage AI to streamline processes.
- Full-Stack Development: Develop user-friendly, high-performance internal web applications using Laravel (PHP) and TypeScript for microservices.
- Infrastructure & Cloud: Deploy, manage, and scale cloud infrastructure using AWS (specifically AWS CDK).
- Pipeline Ownership: Collaborate with internal teams to maintain, optimize, and take ownership of our CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
- Database & API Design: Develop and optimize RESTful API endpoints and effectively manage SQL databases through query optimization and optimal indexing.
- Observability & Security: Implement monitoring and performance tracking (e.g., Datadog) and execute plans to ensure the continued security of our cloud environments.
- Code Quality: Actively participate in code reviews, champion clean architecture, and provide constructive mentorship to peers.
Qualifications
- Experience: Proven experience in software development and DevOps/Cloud infrastructure.
- Frontend Proficiency: Solid understanding of JavaScript frameworks (specifically Vue.js, but React/Angular experience translates well).
- Backend Proficiency: Strong experience with Node.js/TypeScript, alongside familiarity with PHP and the Laravel framework.
- DevOps Skills: Proven track record building applications with Docker, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines in GitHub.
- Database Expertise: Strong experience with SQL and relational data modeling.
- Testing & Monitoring: Experience with TDD/automated testing frameworks (Jest, Playwright, PHPUnit) and building Datadog dashboards.
- Architecture Knowledge: Familiarity with microservices, event-driven architectures, and SaaS release concepts.
- Communication: Exceptional communication skills with a proven ability to work closely with internal stakeholders to gather requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
Goals
- Be part of a full software development life cycle, from conception to deployment.
- Be a team player with an eye for visual design and software usability.
- Champion the adoption of clean, maintainable, and reusable code practices to foster efficient, scalable, and collaborative development.
What We Offer
At Knak, our four foundational pillars are Culture, Customers, Product, and Growth. Culture is our number one pillar because we know it is at the core of building a strong company that can create amazing products and delight our customers. We achieve this by focusing on hiring smart, positive individuals who seek more than a typical nine-to-five. We offer an extremely rewarding, second-to-none work environment, acknowledged by Ottawa's Best Places to Work 2025! We invest in our people through competitive salaries, equity in the company, great benefits, paid vacation, Life leave days (because life happens), team lunches and off-sites, and most importantly, our commitment to your career growth.
If this sounds like something you're looking for, we'd love to hear from you!
If you don't see yourself fully reflected in every job requirement listed above, we still encourage you to reach out and apply. Research shows that women and underrepresented groups often only apply when they feel 100% qualified. We strongly encourage applicants of all genders, ages, ethnicities, cultures, abilities, sexual orientations, and life experiences to apply. Knak believes in creating an inclusive, barrier-free working environment. If you require ANY accommodation for the interview process, please contact [email protected].
At Knak, our recruitment process includes AI screening for keywords and minimum qualifications, as well as video interviews which are transcribed with AI. Humans are still at the core of our decision-making!
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