Solutions Engineer

usekernel; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical + dental

Lunches provided

Unlimited PTO

401k match

Relocation assistance

LLM budget

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Kernel is seeking a technical sales professional to own the end-to-end sales motion—from discovery to production. You will be comfortable in a sales conversation while also diving into engineering details with developers and architects.

You'll work with our founders on strategic deals, help customers design robust production systems, and influence Kernel's roadmap through direct feedback and cross-functional collaboration.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a technical customer-facing role.
• Strong engineering foundation; read and write code.
• Experience owning a technical sales motion.
• Translate between technical and non-technical audiences.
• Love creating demos for developers and customers.
• Experience driving complex, cross-functional deals.
• High tolerance for ambiguity; work with undefined playbooks.
• Experience building with AI agents, MCP servers, or LLM workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical sales motion alongside founders: discovery, demos, solution design, and closing.
• Architect customers' production systems and evaluate design, concurrency, observability, and failure modes.
• Debug integration issues across our SDK, MCP server, and customer code.
• Champion customer requirements and work with engineering to close gaps.
• Contribute to technical content and integration guides.

Skills

Tech sales

Solutions engineer

Cross-functional

Engineering background

Demos & design

Enterprise deals

Tools

Playwright

CDP

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 5000+ 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

You\'ll carry a technical sales motion end-to-end: running discovery, architecting solutions, and seeing customers through to production. That means you\'re as comfortable in a sales conversation as you are in a terminal. You\'ll work closely with our founders on strategic deals, help developers understand what\'s possible with Kernel, and design the systems that make our customers successful.

This role sits at the intersection of sales, engineering, and product. You\'ll influence Kernel\'s roadmap through direct customer feedback, serve as the primary technical point of contact for strategic accounts, and make sure customers go from demo to production without getting stuck.

What you\'ll do

• Own the technical sales motion alongside our founders: discovery, demos, solution design, and closing

• Architect customers\' production systems: CUA agents, browser automations, web agents, and everything in between—helping them think through system design, concurrency, observability, and failure modes

• Debug integration issues across our SDK, MCP server, browser automation edge cases, and customer code

• Champion customer requirements internally and collaborate with engineering to close gaps between current functionality and what customers need next

• Contribute to technical content like integration guides

What we\'re looking for

• 5+ years in a technical customer-facing role: solutions engineer, sales engineer, solutions architect, or similar

• Strong engineering foundation—you can read and write code, dig into SDK internals, and hold your own in a technical conversation with a senior engineer

• Track record of owning a technical sales motion

• Comfortable translating between technical and non-technical audiences without losing precision in either direction

• Love creating demos that help developers understand what\'s possible with Kernel

• Experience driving complex, cross-functional deals and projects from first call to go-live

• High tolerance for ambiguity—many of our customers are building things that don\'t have a playbook yet

• Experience building with AI agents, MCP servers, or LLM-integrated workflows

Even better:

• Familiarity with browser automation or agent infrastructure (Playwright, CDP, headless browsers)

• Prior experience at a developer infrastructure or API-first company

• Experience working on deals with enterprise customers

• You\'ve shipped something public: OSS, a demo, a tool—anything that shows you build, not just advise

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

• $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:

• 30-minute intro call with one of Kernel\'s co-founders

• 45-minute technical interview (virtual)

• Half-day onsite interview (in-person preferred) working with our team on relevant challenges.

• Offer!