About

I'm Dr Claire Knight, an engineering leader with more than twenty years of experience building software and leading the people who build it. I'm currently a Director of Engineering at n8n, and I've previously worked at GitHub and Netlify, co-founded Sailhouse, and held CTO and VP Engineering roles.

I still build things myself. It helps me think, keeps my assumptions honest, and increasingly means directing agents as well as writing code. AI is changing what it costs to turn an idea into working software. I'm interested in what that makes possible, and what it asks of our judgement, our organisations, and the systems we put into production.

What I currently believe

These are the ideas shaping how I work today. They're informed by experience, and open to revision as I learn more, try things, and hear a better argument.

Organise around customer outcomes

Give people a problem worth solving, the context to understand it, and the authority to act. The best intervention might be software, a different policy, a conversation, or removing something we built. Autonomy should serve the outcome; team structures and ownership boundaries should be open to question too.

Reconsider the machinery

When implementation gets cheaper, the processes built around its cost deserve another look. Backlogs, handoffs and approval gates serve needs we should understand before deciding what to keep. I'm more interested in rethinking how we build products than making every stage of the existing process faster.

Make autonomy accountable

People and agents need clear intent, boundaries and feedback. Authority should grow with evidence that it can be used well, and checks should reflect the consequences of getting something wrong. Human accountability doesn't require a person to approve every action. It does require someone who can answer for the system and has the attention to do so.

Build judgement deliberately

Customer understanding, product taste and technical judgement take work to develop. Faster delivery doesn't automatically teach them. We need to give people opportunities to make decisions, see the consequences, and learn with support. Leading people also means caring about their growth, trust and sense of belonging. Directing agents doesn't give us a shortcut through that.

Design for the whole system

Quality and security need to be built into how a system operates and changes. That means continuous evaluation, useful observability, clear limits and ways to stop when something is wrong. Individual components can look sensible while their interactions produce surprises. We need to watch what the whole system actually does.

Where I'm most at home

I've worked from hands-on development through to executive leadership, across startups and larger organisations. I'm most comfortable in organisations of fewer than about 500 people, where I can stay close to the product, the technology and the people making decisions. My background spans native applications, cloud systems and plenty of languages and stacks. That breadth still shapes how I think.

About the handle

You'll find me as krider2010 across platforms. I coined it in 1998: “krider” came from Knight Rider, because Quake wouldn't let me have a twelve-character name. Someone on the internet was already using krider (how rude!), so I added “2010” from Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two. It has followed me around ever since.

Let's connect

If something here gets you thinking, or you disagree with it, I'd like to hear from you. I'm also open to advisory work on a case-by-case basis where my experience would be useful.