Engineering Leader: Hands-on & Scale

Sarah Smith Fund; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Relocation support

London office access

High-autonomy, high-trust environment

Job summary

Kernel is building the business identity layer for agents, delivering a permanent KERN ID and context for every business. You will lead an engineering team as a player-coach, owning end-to-end delivery and setting technical direction while spending a portion writing code yourself.

You will scale systems to handle increasing complexity, collaborate with Product on roadmap, and hire world-class engineers in a fast-paced, high-autonomy startup environment in London.

Qualifications

• 8+ years software engineering experience.
• Track record of hiring and developing strong engineers.
• Strong production systems background; built and scaled meaningful systems.
• Proven experience in distributed systems.
• Experience operating autonomously in small, high-velocity environments – startup experience preferred.
• Experience working with data-focused companies or alongside data/ML teams.

Responsibilities

• Build, hire, and develop a high-performing engineering team.
• Help set technical direction and architecture decisions.
• Work with the engineering to tackle some of our most difficult problems.
• Own engineering delivery with an emphasis on velocity.
• Collaborate closely with Product on roadmap and prioritisation.
• Write code when needed to stay close to the product.

Skills

Enterprise architecture

Leadership

Distributed systems

Startup experience

Data/ML collaboration

Analytical thinking

Hands-on coding

Tools

NodeJS

Postgres

TypeScript

Kubernetes

AWS

NextJS

Tailwind

Clickhouse

Job description

Kernel is building the business identity layer for agents, delivering a permanent KERN ID and context for every business. You will lead an engineering team as a player-coach, owning end-to-end delivery and setting technical direction while spending a portion writing code yourself.

You will scale systems to handle increasing complexity, collaborate with Product on roadmap, and hire world-class engineers in a fast-paced, high-autonomy startup environment in London.