Software Developer

Description

Knak is a mission-driven company

Why? Because our time is limited, our competition is fierce, and our margin for error is small. To have the biggest impact on the world, we stay focused on our core mission, which is...

Empowering marketers to be creative .

That’s why Knak exists.

In a world where AI has made everyone a creator, Knak helps marketers turn ideas into on-brand, high-performing campaigns at scale. The world's most AI-forward companies, including Meta, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Vercel, Notion and Stripe, use Knak as their agentic marketing production layer.

Here's what they and our investor Insight Partners figured out: creation got easy, but that’s making production harder. Every new idea and brief still has to be built, versioned, checked, approved, and shipped across every channel, and that work runs on handoffs, review cycles, and a lot of copy-paste. That middle stretch of the marketing stack has no system, no standard, and no owner.

Knak is the flexible factory for that work. Our customers set the brand rules, choose the tools that feed in and the platforms that send, and decide where AI does the work and where people do. We handle the repeatable parts, so marketers get their time back for the parts that aren't.

We're built by marketers, for marketers. We started with email because it's the hardest channel to get right and where many campaigns win or lose. Now we're bringing that same production discipline to every channel our customers use.

Our Engineering Team:

At Knak, we build groundbreaking software used by marketers at many of the world’s top companies. As engineers, we foster a transparent, collaborative and blameless culture. We emphasize continuous learning and encourage our engineers to experiment in search of creative ways to solve problems and help our customers.

We have a small but rapidly growing team where you'll be given many opportunities to grow and hone your skills across our entire tech stack. Our belief is that to build great software, we have to equip ourselves with the best tools, technologies, and processes.

Roles and Responsibilities:

We are looking for an Intermediate Full Stack Developer to join our growing engineering team. As an Intermediate Developer, you will be responsible for developing user-friendly, high-performance web applications using a variety of full stack web technologies. You will work closely with team leads, product managers and design teams to create compelling user experiences built upon scalable and reliable systems.

Develop, maintain, and optimize RESTful API endpoints using Laravel (PHP), ensuring adherence to best practices for observability, testability, and performance. This includes thorough documentation and robust error handling to enhance the reliability and usability of the APIs.

Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and front-end developers to create intuitive and responsive user interfaces using Vue.js. Implement efficient state management and UI components to deliver a seamless user experience across various devices and screen sizes.

Implement software solutions across the entire technology stack by applying Object-Oriented or Functional Programming principles and best practices, selecting the most appropriate approach to meet the use case.

Effectively apply best practices when using an ORM or SQL interface to a MySQL relational database, including query optimization, efficient data modeling and performance tuning via optimal indexing practices.

Leverage various AWS services to deploy, manage, and scale web applications securely and reliably. Develop serverless microservices using Node.js deployed on AWS Lambda, implement CDN-based content delivery for improved performance, and optimize memory usage for long-running processes to enhance scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Actively participate in code reviews to ensure code quality, maintainability, and adherence to coding standards. Provide constructive feedback to peers and collaborate with them to identify and address areas for improvement.

Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product management, QA, and DevOps, to analyze business requirements and technical objectives. Contribute to the design and implementation of solutions that align with both business needs and technical constraints, fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation within the team.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 3+ years of software development experience, with a proven track record of building and maintaining SaaS based web applications
• Experience in developing RESTful APIs, including authentication, validation, and error handling.
• Solid understanding of JavaScript frameworks such as VueJS/React/Angular and their ecosystem, build and deployment patterns.
• Experience with TDD and automated testing frameworks such as Jest, Playwright PHPUnit
• A keen eye for observability, monitoring, and performance optimization.
• Familiarity with common SaaS architecture/release concepts, such as continuous deployments, multi-tenant architectures and services layered architecture.
• The Ideal Candidate will have
• Experience working with PHP and the Laravel framework.
• An understanding of SaaS software development practice, previous experience working on a SaaS product will be viewed favorably.
• Familiarity with common SaaS architecture/release concepts, such as continuous deployments, multi-tenant architectures and services layered architecture.
• 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.
• Collaborate with peers on the creation of clean, maintainable, and reusable code practices.
• Base Salary: The anticipated base salary range for this position is $120,000 - 150,000k/year. Final compensation will be determined based on factors including relevant experience, skills, qualifications, and internal equity. This range reflects base salary only and does not include other forms of compensation that may be available as part of the total rewards package.

Benefits

• At Knak we have four foundational pillars. Culture, customers, product and growth. Culture is our number one pillar because we know that is at the core of building a strong company that can build amazing products and delight our customers. We do this with a laser focus on hiring the right people who are smart, positive and who want more than the typical nine-to-five offers.
• We offer an extremely rewarding, second to none work environment as acknowledged by Ottawa’s Best Places to Work 2025 ! We show our investment in our people through our 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, then we’d love to hear from you!
• If you don’t see yourself fully reflected in every job requirement listed on the posting above, we still encourage you to reach out and apply. Research has shown 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 to the interview process please contact culture@knak.com.
• 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! Please note that this job post is for an existing vacancy.