Careers

One role is open. An AI Product Manager, working from Europe. That is the whole list, and the list stays short on purpose: a company that publishes the companies it turned down should be able to publish an honest headcount as well.

There is no general application form here collecting messages nobody reads. If the role below is not yours, the honest answer is that there is nothing else open today, and we would rather say that than convert your afternoon into a row in a database.

Who this is

Knockwire is built by the team behind Crawlbase, a web crawling and proxy infrastructure business running since 2017, with more than 46,000 paying customers. Knockwire itself is new. Its first customer is Crawlbase, so the product runs against our own pipeline before it runs against anyone else’s, and the refusals we complain about are our own.

How the team works

• Small, and hiring in ones. There is no headcount plan and nothing pre-approved for next quarter. When the work outgrows the people, we write one role and it appears on this page.
• The refusals are the job. A demo pass reads about 4,182 companies and qualifies 11. Almost all of the effort goes into candidates nobody will ever be contacted about. If that reads as wasted work rather than as the work, this is the wrong team to join.
• We publish the parts that go badly. We turned down 379 companies for every one we contacted between 27 January and 26 July 2026, then found that roughly a third of those refusals were data cleaning rather than judgment, and published that against ourselves. It made the headline number smaller and the Rejection Index worth reading.
• Constraints are structural, not settings. Nothing is delivered without a named person approving that specific draft, we do not solve CAPTCHAs or bot detection, and nothing on a timer ever sends. Those hold when a customer asks otherwise, which is the part that has to suit you.
• The build enforces some of the writing. An em dash anywhere in the copy tables fails the build, in all five languages, and a key missing from a page that has been translated is a compile error rather than an English sentence quietly appearing in French. The rest of the style guide is enforced in review, which is slower and less reliable, and we know it.
• Five languages from the start. English, Japanese, Portuguese (BR), Spanish and French. Every sentence a reader sees lives in a typed table, not in a component, including this one.

What the work is

Stated plainly so you can judge it. Next.js on the App Router, TypeScript, Drizzle and MySQL, a discovery pass on a four-hour timer, and a review queue where a person approves or kills each draft. The two directory sources read public pages one request at a time, with a deliberate pause between them, and a 429 stops that source for the rest of the pass instead of retrying into a block. That last sentence is most of the engineering culture here.

The unbuilt parts are unbuilt in public too. Email sending does not exist and is scheduled for Q4 2026. Anyone who joins will spend time on things that are late.

What we would hire for, when we hire

None of these is open. They are the shapes we expect, written down now so the eventual posting is not a surprise and you can tell today whether it would ever be you.

• Someone who argues with the filter. Reading refusals, finding the ones that were wrong, and changing the gates that produced them. Closer to research than to sales engineering.
• A product engineer who writes. Features here ship with the prose that explains them, and the prose is reviewed as carefully as the query.
• Someone who owns the rules as a working system. Jurisdiction policy, suppression, retention, and the questions a customer’s counsel asks first. Germany and Italy are held back by default, and decisions like that need someone keeping them current.
• Support that actually answers. Every message reaches a person today. That arrangement has a ceiling and we can see it.

If you think you are the exception

Then write, and say so in the first line. Use the contact form and choose General. It takes text only, so send a link rather than a file.

What helps: one thing you have made that we can go and look at, and the reason you want this company rather than a company like it. What does not help: a paragraph about admiring the mission, or a summary of a CV we cannot see.

We read everything and reply to everything, usually within a day. If there is still nothing open, the reply will say that rather than promising to keep you on file. We use what you send only to reply to you, on the same terms as the privacy notice, and we do not keep a candidate pipeline for later.

Recruiters

We are not working with agencies and we do not read unsolicited candidate lists. One role, filled by people who will read every application themselves, is not a brief worth writing, so there is nothing to be gained on either side.

The longer version

If you want to know how this team thinks before deciding whether to write, the field notes are the honest record rather than the pitch. The four gates and what each costs describes the daily decision, and what happened when we loosened the filter is the month we relaxed it by 15 points and watched the reply rate fall further than the volume rose.