Infrastructure Engineer

usekernel; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Industry-competitive salary

Above market equity

Premium medical + dental coverage + 2

Small, trusting team of senior + staff

Async with minimal meetings

LLM usage budget

Daily lunches

Unlimited PTO

401k + company match

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Kernel is building fast open source browser infrastructure for AI agents. As an Infrastructure Engineer at Kernel, you’ll architect and build core systems powering our platform end-to-end, owning from conception to production.

You’ll design scalable distributed infrastructure, shape critical technical surfaces, and influence hiring and culture as we grow. You’ll work with bleeding edge tech in a fast-paced startup environment, delivering high impact results.

Qualifications

• Experience scaling and designing distributed systems.
• Interest or experience in microVMs / unikernels and developer tools.
• ≥1 year of experience at a company with <50 people.
• Technical excellence: core infrastructure that’s open source; decisions are the product.
• Low ego, high impact; focus on building meaningful systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and scale new product infrastructure, developer tools, and APIs.
• Set direction for critical technical surface areas to stay ahead of growth.
• Shape Kernel’s hiring decisions and culture as we grow.

Skills

Distributed systems

MicroVMs

Open source

Developer tools

Job description

About Kernel

Kernel is crazy fast, open source browser infrastructure for AI agents. We handle autoscaling, observability, and the messy details of web interaction, so developers can focus on what their agents do instead of how they do it.

Teams at Cash App, Rye, and 3000+ others use Kernel for deep research, QA automation, and real-time web analysis. We've raised $22M from Accel, YC, and Vercel.

If you're interested in building critical infrastructure for agents on the web, we'd love to chat.

About the role

As an Infrastructure Engineer at Kernel, you’ll architect and build the core systems that power our AI agent platform end-to-end. You’ll own critical infrastructure from conception to production, working with bleeding edge tech that needs to be both reliable and low latency. You’ll also play a foundational role in how we build Kernel’s culture.

What you’ll do

• Design, develop, and scale new product infrastructure, developer tools, and APIs

• Set direction for critical technical surface areas, enabling us to stay ahead of rapid growth

• Shape Kernel’s hiring decisions and culture as we grow

What we’re looking for

• Experience scaling and designing distributed systems

• Interest or experience in microVMs / unikernels and developer tools

• >=1 year of experience at a company with <50 people

• Technical excellence: we’re building core infrastructure that’s default open source. As a developer tool, our technical decisions are the product, and the details matter a lot.

• Low ego, high impact: you care more about building something meaningful than who gets credit

• Start-up ready: early stage sometimes means figuring it out as we go, and that energizes rather than drains you

• Excited to crush it: we’re moving fast and looking for people excited about high velocity, high impact work, and having fun along the way.

What you can expect as a Kernel

• Industry-competitive salary

• Above market equity

• Premium medical + dental coverage + dependent coverage

• Small, trusting team of senior + staff engineers

• Default async with minimal bureaucracy, only one meeting a week

• $1k / mo budget for LLM usage fees #vibecheck

• Daily lunches on us

• Unlimited PTO

• 401k + company match

• Relocation assistance

Hiring process

We have a simple process focused on real world collaboration and jointly getting to know each other:

1. 30-minute intro call with one of Kernel’s co-founders

2. 45-minute technical interview (virtual)

3. Half-day on-site (virtual or in-person) working with our team on relevant challenges.

4. Offer!