Engineering Manager

About Kernel Agents are starting to sell, buy and operate on behalf of companies. But before an agent can close a deal, qualify an account, route a lead or assess risk, it has to answer a basic question: which company is this? Today, that answer is messy, and no one answers it reliably. Business identity lives across CRMs, ERPs and third-party datasets full of duplicates, missing parent companies, stale addresses and incorrect enrichment. The cost shows up across the enterprise: sales teams miss revenue opportunities because they lack the right account context; operations teams take on avoidable exposure because risk signals are fragmented or wrong; and finance teams end up chasing, writing off, or defaulting on bad debt that should have been caught earlier. Humans have worked around that mess for years. Agents cannot. They need a reliable business identity layer they can trust. Kernel is building that layer: the business registry for agents. We issue a permanent KERN ID for every business, plus the context an agent needs to act on it. Ops, data and revenue teams at Gong, Legora, Mistral, Canva and Checkout already use Kernel on their own systems. Agents are next, and there will be far more of them. We have raised $20M from top VCs and operators at Plaid, OpenAI, Slack and others, and we are growing 5x YoY. The Role You'll be a player-coach engineering leader with a spike in technical strategy, you'll own engineering delivery for your team end-to-end - from developing exceptional engineers to solving some of our most difficult engineering problems & setting technical direction. This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll spend roughly 20% of your time contributing code and 80% leading your 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 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 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 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 Experience working in a data-focused company or closely alongside a data engineering/ML team - data is core to what we're building at Kernel, and you will play a key role in shaping how we grow that capability 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 engin