Senior Product Manager

Kernel; 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 + 1

Unlimited PTO

401k + company match

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Kernel is hiring a Product Manager to own a core part of our platform. You will set vision, work with engineering partners, and build prototypes using AI tools. You’ll define problems and solutions, drive adoption, and partner with external teams to scale impact.

You’ll focus on delivering customer value, shaping market-ready offerings, pricing, and documentation, while maintaining strong communication with engineers and stakeholders across the business.

Qualifications

• Owned a technical product end to end and was accountable for its core metric.
• 4+ years as a PM, founder or early-employee experience is a plus.
• Excellent judgment and taste; able to make high-stakes calls with incomplete data.
• Ships, reads code, and can scope with engineers using AI tooling.
• Strong written and verbal communication for engineers, executives, and partners.
• Curiosity about the frontier of the web and how HTTP, sessions, OAuth/OpenID, CDNs, and bot management work.

Responsibilities

• Define your product area's vision, strategy, and outcome metrics; prioritize, build, and measure impact.
• Delight customers by directly engaging with them to uncover unmet needs.
• Take what you build to market: shape positioning, pricing, docs, and adoption.
• Build prototypes with AI to test ideas with customers and scope work for engineering.
• Drive partnerships with external teams.
• Work closely with engineers and influence through data and storytelling.

Skills

Technical PM

End-to-end ownership

Data-driven decisions

Communication

AI tooling

Tools

AI coding tools

Job description

About KERNEL

KERNEL is infrastructure for AI agents to use the internet. Agents buy things, run back-office operations and test apps on KERNEL cloud browsers designed for performance, reliability and scale, with identity, observability and payments built in. KERNEL works with any agent harness or model and is trusted by Town, Middesk, Framer, Vercel and more than 20,000 teams. Founded in 2025, we are backed by $22M+ from top investors including Accel and Y Combinator.

Our vision is to be the Internet runtime for agents. Agent traffic now outpaces human traffic. The web needs new rails for access, identity, and trust and we’re building them.

The role

We're hiring Product Managers to own core parts of KERNEL's platform. This job description covers several PM roles across the problem spaces below.

Our engineers work with high agency and bring strong product intuition. You’ll set the direction for your area and, with your engineering partners, own whether it succeeds in the market. That means setting priorities, persuading with evidence, and acting as KERNEL's bridge to customers and partners. You'll scope your work, build working prototypes, and write persuasive specs. You'll define problems as often as you solve them.

As KERNEL grows and the technology evolves, you’ll move toward the most important problems and spot new opportunities before anyone asks. Your scope will follow the most impactful work.

Where you might focus

You'll likely start in one of the areas below.

• Open Access. Can an agent reach the sites it needs? Some things you might work on: shipping new features that give developers tools to unlock more websites; measuring access per site; creating a signed session identity that website operators can verify; building partnerships with merchants and bot-management and CDN providers; developing standards like Web Bot Auth.

• Auth + Identity. When a session acts for a person, who is that person, and how can an agent safely use that person's information on the Internet? Some things you might work on: user-approved sign-in, MFA, and session persistence; extending our Vaults primitive to capture more credential types; credential-manager integrations; designing what authorized, intent-bound sessions with KERNEL might look like.

• Enterprise Platform. Can our enterprise customers run agent workloads on KERNEL at scale, within their security and compliance requirements? Some things you might work on: offering data residency in the regions our customers operate in; customer-managed encryption keys and private networking; audit logs and admin controls that pass enterprise security reviews; compliance programs such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001; capacity, reliability, and SLAs for customers running browsers at very high concurrency.

You will:

• Define your product area's vision, strategy, and outcome metrics. Prioritize, build, and measure impact.

• Delight customers by working with them directly, uncovering unmet needs, and identifying opportunities to build broadly useful solutions.

• Take what you build to market: shape positioning, pricing, and docs, equip GTM, and own adoption after launch.

• Build prototypes yourself with AI, and use them to test ideas with customers and scope work before it reaches engineering.

• Drive partnerships with external teams that touch your product area.

• Work closely with our engineers, and influence through data and storytelling.

What we're looking for

• You've owned a technical product end to end and you were accountable for its core metric.

  • For most people that means 4+ years as a PM, but we care more about ownership than years. Founder or early-employee experience is a plus.

• You have excellent judgment and taste. You’ve made high-stakes calls with incomplete data, and you can walk us through how you made them.

• You ship. You use AI coding tools to turn an idea into a working prototype, you can read and change a codebase, and engineers trust your scoping.

  • Our customers are developers, so strong PM candidates are technical and may even have started their career as a software engineer.

• You use AI in your daily work, and are skilled at steering AI to accelerate on the most high-value work.

• You have strong communication ability, both written and verbal. You write clearly enough for an engineer, an executive, and an external partner to understand.

• You are excited to work on the frontier of the Agentic Internet, where standards are still undefined. You have the curiosity to go deep on how the web works: HTTP, cookies and sessions, OAuth and OpenID Connect, CDNs, and bot management.

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

• Daily lunches on us

• Unlimited PTO

• 401k + company match

• Relocation assistance