Engineering Manager

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: Introductory Call (45 minutes)
An introductory conversation covering your professional background and what you’re looking for in your next role.

Stage 2: Hiring Manager Call (30 minutes)
A conversation with Marcus focused on ways of working and team collaboration.

Stage 3: Technical Deep Dive (60 minutes)
An in-depth discussion exploring your architectural thinking and past technical decisions.

Stage 4: Leadership Scenario Interview (60 minutes)
An onsite interview at our London office, where we’ll walk through real challenges you’d likely face in the role.

Final Stage: Founders Interview
A conversation with our co-founders, Anders and Marcus, focused on values alignment and long-term vision.

Upon mutual fit: references and offer stage.