Senior Software Engineer - AI Foundations

Kraken; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Kraken is hiring Senior Software Engineers to build and operate AI Foundations platforms. You will own large-scale services, design containerized systems and ship AI agents across multiple tools while grounding AI in Kraken knowledge and governance.

You will work with AWS, Kubernetes and LangChain-based stacks, mentoring peers and driving adoption across Kraken teams with clear documentation and strong engineering judgment.

Qualifications

• Senior-level software engineering with end-to-end ownership.
• Strong fundamentals in design, concurrency, security and architecture.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agents.
• Cloud experience, especially AWS, and reliable services.
• Clear communication to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Willingness to learn rapidly in a changing AI space.

Responsibilities

• Build shared AI platform services like gateways and knowledge pipelines.
• Develop and run agents across Slack, GitHub, Notion and Asana.
• Ground AI in Kraken context with structured knowledge.
• Define tests, create reproducible evals and add tracing.
• Implement safety, guardrails, and data-access controls.
• Deploy and operate services on AWS and Kubernetes.
• Drive adoption by collaborating with engineers and non-technical teams.
• Raise engineering bar through design reviews and reusable patterns.

Skills

Senior engineering

LLM experience

AWS

Python

Communication

Learning agility

Product sense

Tools

Kubernetes

LangChain

Django

GitHub

Datadog/OpenTelemetry

Job description

Help us use technology to make a big green dent in the universe!

Kraken powers some of the most innovative global developments in energy.

We create the technology that redefines utilities and unlocks a new energy system of the future. By optimising renewable generation, building a more intelligent grid, and empowering utilities to deliver an exceptional customer experience, our operating system is transforming the industry worldwide.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to work in energy. Join us on our mission to improve the lives of ONE BILLION humans within the decade and shape a cleaner, better future for everyone.

AI is a key investment area for Kraken Technologies. A crucial part of this is building the shared foundations that let every team use AI well and move faster on our mission.

AI Foundations

We build the platform that lets teams across Kraken build and run AI agents. Our work covers four areas:

• Access: connecting people and systems to approved AI models and tools

• Context: grounding AI in trusted Kraken knowledge, data and systems

• Enablement: reusable building blocks for AI-powered workflows and products

• Governance: permissions, safety, quality, cost and visibility across the lifecycle

Where you'll fit in

We're hiring Senior Software Engineers to join one of our three squads:

• Context: Build the Kraken-specific knowledge layer to make LLMs useful. This covers our internal AI assistant, a structured "client brain" that captures client context and decisions, and pipelines that collect knowledge from tools like Notion, Slack and GitHub.

• Tooling: deliver LLMs into people's hands. We run the AI Hub (usage insights, MCP gateway, self-serve and specialist agents), the LiteLLM gateway behind Claude Code, Codex and Claude Desktop, and secure cloud dev boxes for AI-assisted engineering.

• Evals & Observability: covers skill evals, internal benchmarking, agent safety and guardrails, and observability for live AI runs.

Squads are flexible: when priorities shift, people move. This is a hands-on senior individual-contributor role. With your squad lead and the wider team, you'll own large parts of our platform, turn ideas into production systems, shape architecture decisions and help raise the engineering bar.

What you’ll own

• Build shared AI platform services: Design, build and run Python services that other teams rely on, such as gateways, agent runtimes, knowledge pipelines and eval harnesses.

• Build and run agents: Work out how agents are triggered, authenticated, monitored and governed across systems like Slack, GitHub, Notion and Asana. Ship both self-serve agents and specialist agents.

• Ground AI in Kraken context: Collect, structure and serve company knowledge so agents give answers that are correct, current and safe to use.

• Measure and prove quality: Define meaningful test cases, build evals whose results can be reproduced, and add tracing so we know how AI behaves in real use.

• Build in safety and governance: Turn permissions, guardrails, budgets and data-access rules into software you can maintain, working with Security and TechOps.

• Operate in AWS: Deploy and support services on AWS and Kubernetes, and make sound reliability, performance and cost trade-offs.

• Drive adoption: Work directly with engineers and non-technical teams, run workshops, write clear docs and turn feedback into product.

• Raise the engineering bar: Review designs and code, mentor others, and create patterns that can be reused across AI Foundations.

What you bring to the party

• Strong senior-level software engineering: You have owned complex services end to end, from design through testing, deployment and operation.

• Deep engineering fundamentals: Good judgement on system design, concurrency, security, testing and architecture trade-offs. Strong production Python.

• Hands-on LLM and agent experience: You have built real things with LLMs, you know where they fail, and you use AI coding tools every day.

• Cloud experience: You're comfortable running services in AWS and owning their reliability and scalability.

• Product sense: You care whether people actually use what you build.

• Clear communication: You can explain trade-offs to technical and non-technical people and challenge ideas constructively.

• Learning agility: You pick up new tools and domains quickly in a field that changes every month.

What success looks like

• Adoption: You ship platform features that teams across Kraken adopt and rely on.

• Solid systems: The services you own are observable, secure, scalable and cost-aware.

• Trust at scale: Teams can build and trust agents without rebuilding the basics.

• Team impact: You make your squad, and the teams around it, better.

Bonus points:

• AI engineering: Pydantic AI, LiteLLM, LangChain, MCP servers

• Knowledge and retrieval: RAG, search, embeddings, knowledge graphs

• Evals and safety: Inspect AI, Ragas, OpenAI Evals, NeMo Guardrails, red teaming

• Platform: Kubernetes, sandboxed or cloud dev environments, AWS Bedrock

• Backend: Django

• Observability: Datadog, OpenTelemetry

Are you ready for a career with us? We want to ensure you have the right tools and environment to unleash your potential. If you have any accommodation requests, please contact us at [e-mail]. We'll do our best to tailor the experience to your needs so you can feel comfortable, confident and be at your best!

Studies have shown that some groups of people, like women, are less likely to apply to a role unless they meet 100% of the job requirements. Whoever you are, if you like one of our jobs, we encourage you to apply as you might just be the candidate we’re looking for! At Kraken, we're creating a team of genuine, honest, empathetic people. Our people are our strongest asset and the unique skills and perspectives people bring to the team are the driving force of our success. As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute. We consider all applicants without regard to race, colour, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.

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*Please note that, in line with our current recruitment policy, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this position; applicants must have the right to work in the country that they're applying to, at the time of application.