AI Ops Engineer (Product)

Kernel; London (KY); On-site; USD 79,000 - 112,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Holiday leave (24 days + bank holidays

Dinner allowance £450/month

Work-from-anywhere 2 weeks

Parental leave

Pension plan

Top-spec equipment

Team events

Direct work with founders

Autonomy & pace

Job summary

Kernel is seeking an AI Ops Engineer for its product team to build internal systems that scale with minimal manual work. You will work across Product, Customer Support, and Engineering to tackle the highest-leverage problems, delivering practical AI-powered workflows.

This hands-on role involves turning ideas into tools, automations or data pipelines and maintaining them in production, choosing fast, sensible approaches for each problem.

Qualifications

• 2–5 years of experience building tools, automations or AI workflows.
• Experience in a small, fast-moving startup is a plus.
• Interest in turning messy data into reliable workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead automation of customer support workflows.
• Turn user feedback into evals and tests.
• Keep product documentation current.
• Build tools to help sales demos using account data.

Skills

Shipping tools

Startup experience

AI workflows

Data instincts

Job description

About Kernel

Agents are starting to sell, buy and operate on behalf of companies. But before an agent can close a deal, qualify an account, route a lead or assess risk, it has to answer a basic question: which company is this?

Today, that answer is messy, and no one answers it reliably. Business identity lives across CRMs, ERPs and third‑party datasets full of duplicates, missing parent companies, stale addresses and incorrect enrichment. The cost shows up across the enterprise: sales teams miss revenue opportunities because they lack the right account context; operations teams take on avoidable exposure because risk signals are fragmented or wrong; and finance teams end up chasing and writing off bad debt that should have been caught earlier.

Humans have worked around that mess for years. Agents cannot. They need a reliable business identity layer they can trust.

Kernel is building that layer: the business registry for agents. We issue a permanent KERN ID for every business, plus the context an agent needs to act on it. Ops, data and revenue teams at Gong, Legora, Mistral, Canva and Checkout already use Kernel on their own systems. Agents are next, and there will be far more of them.

We have raised $14M from top VCs and operators at Plaid, OpenAI, Slack and others, and we are growing 5x YoY.

The Role

We’re looking for an AI Ops Engineer for our product team to build the internal systems that help Kernel scale without adding unnecessary manual work.

You’ll work across Product, Customer Support, and Engineering - finding the highest‑leverage problems and building practical AI‑powered workflows.

This is a hands‑on builder role. You’ll take ideas from a vague business problem to a tool or workflow that people use, then maintain and improve it in production. You’ll choose the fastest sensible approach for each problem - coding agents, automation platforms, APIs, data pipelines or lightweight code.

Your focus area will be whatever is the most critical blocker for Kernel’s growth, whether that’s automating our customer support, tying our data feedback loop to automatically seed our evals (benchmarks), building tooling for our sales team to demonstrate Kernel, and so on.

You’ll report to Marcus Henglein, our co‑founder who leads our Product, Engineering, and Client Delivery teams.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Automating customer support: The first focus area is to lead our initiative on automating as much of our technical customer support as possible, leveraging Kernel’s docs and MCPs, the right kind of AI tooling, and working closely with the engineering team.

• Turning user feedback into evals: Build workflows that turn data issues reported by users into test cases, helping Kernel catch recurring errors and measure improvements.

• Keeping docs current: Build workflows that detect product changes and keep our documentation accurate.

• Making Kernel easier to demo: Build tools that help our sales team prepare and run demos using relevant account data.

Priorities shift, problems often start loosely scoped, and you’ll own the work through maintenance.

What You Bring

• A track record of shipping: you’ve built tools, automations or AI workflows that people use every day, ideally inside a small, fast‑moving startup. Around 2–5 years of experience is typical, but what you’ve built matters more than your years. Ex‑founders welcome

• Curious about product: you’re keen to learn how a product/engineering organization works in a fast‑paced startup environment

• AI‑tool obsessed: you are constantly testing new models, agents, MCPs and workflows, and you have the judgement to turn them into reliable systems that people actually adopt - but without turning off the “Local LLM” that you were born with (your brain)

• Strong data instincts: you can turn fragmented, messy information into reliable workflows and create feedback loops that keep it trustworthy

• Can’t unsee inefficiency: you see the company as a connected system; when you find a broken or unnecessarily manual process, your instinct is to understand it, build the fix and make sure it sticks

Artisanal programming experience is not required for this role, and you don’t need a traditional software engineering background.

This role may not be for you if you:

• Prefer deep specialization over breadth: this role means switching between projects and teams, depending on business needs

• Prefer steady‑state work over project‑based sprints: priorities will shift as the business evolves

• Only want “strategic” work: you will personally build the tools, clean the data and fix the workflows

• Need every task to be clearly scoped before starting: ambiguity and learning on the fly are constant

• Avoid operational grunt work or lose interest after the prototype

• Want to work in a more structured 9‑to‑6 environment or in a remote/hybrid setup: we are in the office together 4–5 days a week and the pace is high

What We Offer

We will do our best to offer you a ride of a lifetime. It will not be easy, but it will be thrilling.

• Salary: £60,000–£85,000 + equity

• 24 days holiday per year + bank holidays

• £450 monthly office dinner allowance

• 2 weeks work‑from‑anywhere

• Generous parental leave policy

• Pension plan

• Top‑spec equipment and central London office

• Team events and dinners

• Work directly with the founders to deploy AI across a fast‑growing company

• High‑autonomy, high‑trust environment with a small team shipping at pace

Interview Process

Stage 1 – Video call with the Hiring Manager.

Stage 2 – Case study interview (in person) with the team.

Stage 3 – Values interview with the Founders.

If there is mutual fit, we move to references and offer.