Senior Product Engineer

Kernel

London (KY)

On-site

USD 146,000 - 200,000

Full time

12 days ago

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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

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, writing off, or defaulting on 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 $20M from top VCs and operators at Plaid, OpenAI, Slack and others, and we are growing 5x YoY.

The Role

You are a T-shaped product engineer with a spike in backend engineering. You will work closely with the product and engineering team to build user-facing features, ship at pace, and support the existing infrastructure as we scale. You do not need to be a DevOps expert, but familiarity with AWS and Kubernetes is valuable.

You take initiative, adapt quickly, and communicate clearly. The team is small and fast-moving, so you’ll be expected to make decisions and ship code autonomously. You will help the company grow from $3M to $30M ARR, owning projects end-to-end—from ideation to deployment—while helping shape how we build products and infrastructure at Kernel.

What You’ll Be Doing

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

What You Bring

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) - either through production experience or demonstrated personal projects. If you're new to LLMs but have shipped complex production systems in other domains and are comfortable rapidly learning new technologies, we'd still love to hear from you.
Ability to operate autonomously in a small, high-velocity team
Excellent communication and collaboration skills
Some experience with Kubernetes or distributed systems

It is a plus if you also have:

Experience working on AI-driven or data-heavy products
Frontend experience (NextJS, React, TypeScript)
Understanding of CRM data models or workflow automation

This role may not be for you if you:

Need lots of structure or long‑term roadmaps
Prefer perfect specs before building
Focus narrowly on backend or frontend only

This role is definitely not for you if you:

Prefer fully remote work (this role requires at least 3 days a week in the office)
Don’t enjoy the pace of early‑stage startups
Want to manage a team rather than build

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.