Engineering Lead

The role

You will be a player-coach engineering leader owning end-to-end engineering delivery. You will build and develop a high-performing team while setting technical direction and architecture decisions.

What you will do

• Build, hire, and develop a high-performing engineering team
• Help set technical direction and architecture decisions
• Work with the engineering to tackle some of our most difficult problems
• Own engineering delivery with an emphasis on velocity
• Collaborate closely with Product on roadmap and prioritisation
• Write code when needed

Required qualifications

• 8+ years software engineering experience
• Track record of hiring and developing strong engineers
• Strong production systems background
• Proven experience in distributed systems
• Experience operating autonomously in small, high-velocity environments
• Experience working in a data-focused company or closely alongside a data engineering/ML team

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
• Hands-on Data Engineering or ML Engineering experience

Benefits

• 24 days holiday per year + bank holidays
• £450 Monthly Office Dinner Allowance
• 2 weeks work-from-anywhere
• Generous parental leave policy
• Pension plan
• Top-spec equipment
• Central London office
• Team events and dinners

Before you apply

• We sponsor visas for exceptional candidates
• Provide relocation support for those moving to London

About the company

Kernel is building a business registry for agents. They have raised $20M from top VCs and operators and are growing 12x YoY.