Senior Backend Engineer, AI/LLM Platform

Kernel; London (KY); On-site; USD 146,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary: £110,000 – £150,000 + equity

24 days holiday + bank holidays

£450 Monthly Office Dinner Allowance

2 weeks work-from-anywhere

Pension plan

Top-spec equipment and central London

Team events and dinners

Founders collaboration with leadership

High-autonomy, high-trust environment

Job summary

Kernel is seeking a T-shaped product engineer with a backend focus to join our London-based team. You will design and ship user-facing features, scale production systems, and own projects end-to-end—from ideation to deployment—while collaborating with product, design, and other engineers.

Bring 6+ years of software experience, NodeJS, Postgres, TypeScript, and experience with AWS and Kubernetes. In-office presence required three days a week in London.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software or product engineering experience.
• Strong experience building and scaling production systems.
• Comfort with backend engineering (NodeJS, Postgres, TypeScript).
• Strong understanding of LLM application development patterns (RAG, prompt engineering, consistency testing).
• Ability to operate autonomously in a small, high-velocity team.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Some experience with Kubernetes or distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Designing and developing product features that directly impact user workflows
• Collaborating with design, product, and other engineers to deliver exceptional user experiences
• Writing and maintaining clean, reliable, and scalable code across the stack
• Helping ensure performance and reliability for large-scale data operations
• Automating workflows to improve developer velocity and reduce manual work
• Supporting integrations with CRMs and third-party APIs
• Participating in roadmap discussions and contributing technical insights

Skills

6+ years experience

Production systems

Backend engineering

NodeJS

Postgres

TypeScript

LLM patterns

Autonomy

Communication

Kubernetes

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

NextJS

React

TypeScript tooling

Job description

Kernel is seeking a T-shaped product engineer with a backend focus to join our London-based team. You will design and ship user-facing features, scale production systems, and own projects end-to-end—from ideation to deployment—while collaborating with product, design, and other engineers.

Bring 6+ years of software experience, NodeJS, Postgres, TypeScript, and experience with AWS and Kubernetes. In-office presence required three days a week in London.