Engineering Manager

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About Kernel

Kernel provides enterprise RevOps teams with AI-powered company data for their CRMs. We raised $14M in Series A funding from top VCs and operators at Plaid, OpenAI, and Slack to build an AI-native alternative to Dun & Bradstreet's entity and hierarchy data.

RevOps teams at Navan, Gong, Mistral, and AlphaSense use Kernel to run their organizations.

At Kernel, we process 7B+ tokens a day and run 1.8M+ agents daily, all on an architecture that's intentionally simple: one database, one queue. It's minimalism built for massive scale (For reference, Wikipedia has 2.3B tokens in the English wikipedia). Our queue processes a daily volume on par with the entire Visa network's transactions (~365M/day). All of which has been built by a small but mighty team of engineers.

The Role

You'll be a player-coach engineering leader with a spike in technical strategy, working closely with the founders to drive the hiring roadmap. You'll own engineering delivery end-to-end - from developing exceptional engineers to setting technical direction - while helping the company grow from $3M to $30M ARR.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll spend roughly 30% of your time contributing code and 70% leading the team, with that ratio shifting as we scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Build, hire, and develop a high-performing engineering team
• Help set technical direction and architecture decisions
• Own engineering delivery with an emphasis on velocity
• Collaborate closely with Product on roadmap and prioritization
• Write code when needed so you'll stay close to the product

The opportunity

We are in the unique situation that our commercial traction is ahead of our product. You'll play a leading role in moving towards automation in a way that enables us to rapidly scale with increased complexity and specific customer nuances.

About You

• You have extensive experience in architecting enterprise-level systems, delivering on ambitious product visions, and building world class engineering teams.
• You have worked at high-growth businesses, and might have previously started your own company.
• You are highly analytical, and thinking proactively through the implications of your decisions, but also have high conviction and understand the importance of moving at pace and shipping often.
• You have previously led engineering at a company from its earliest stages, and don't shy away from the manager role - you know what great looks like, and want to help engineers grow.

Essential Experience

• 8+ years software engineering experience, with 2+ years leading engineering teams

• Track record of hiring and developing strong engineers
• Strong production systems background - you've built and scaled things that matter, and you've done something hard and lived to tell the tale
• Proven experience in distributed systems
• Experience operating autonomously in small, high-velocity environments - ideally in a startup

Nice-to-Have:

• Scaled an engineering team through a growth phase (5 → 20+ engineers), or from Series A to Series C
• Technical depth across the stack: NodeJS, Postgres, TypeScript, Kubernetes AI-driven or data-heavy product experience
• Understanding of LLMs (e.g., RAG, prompt engineering, evals)
• CRM data models or workflow automation knowledge

This role may not be for you if you:

• Insist on shipping pixel-perfect code
• Prefer managing from a distance without technical involvement
• Need extensive process and structure before making decisions

This role is definitely not for you:

• If you over-rely on AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) to the point where you don't read or understand your own code
• If you on the other hand don't understand how these tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) can be force multipliers for senior engineers if used correctly
• If you prefer fully remote work
• If you don't like early-stage startup pace
• If you're seeking a purely 'hands-off' role

Tech Stack

• Backend: AWS, NodeJS, TypeScript, Postgres
• Frontend: NextJS, TypeScript, Tailwind

You don't need to know everything, but you should be comfortable diving into any part of the stack.

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.

• Salary: £140,000 - £200,000 + equity
• 24 days holiday per year + bank holidays
• 2 weeks work-from-anywhere
• Pension plan
• Top-spec equipment and central London office
• Free dinner at the office
• Team events and dinners
• Work directly with the founders to scale the systems that power enterprise AI

Team

We are around 30 people with 7 engineers and 1 Product Manager, including:

• Sam Houghton, Founding Engineer
• Eleanor Leung, Senior Engineer
• David Saltares, Senior Engineer
• Stefan Sabev, Head of Product
• Tom Ankers, Senior Engineer
• Willis Chou, Senior Engineer

Visas & Relocation

We sponsor visas for exceptional candidates and provide relocation support for those moving to London.

Interview Process

Stage 1: 30-minute introductory call covering your professional background and what you're looking for

Stage 2: 30-minute call with Marcus (Hiring manager) on ways of working

Stage 3: Technical deep-dive (60 mins) exploring your architectural thinking and past technical decisions

Stage 4: Leadership scenario interview (60 mins) in our London office - we'll discuss real challenges you'd face here

Final Stage: Founders interview with the co-founders, Anders and Marcus, on values alignment and vision

Upon mutual fit: references and offer stage.