Engineering Manager at Kernel
London, United Kingdom
on-site · full_time · {"@type":"MonetaryAmount","currency":"GBP","value":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","minValue":140000,"maxValue":180000,"unitText":"YEAR"}} · Visa sponsorship
Responsibilities:
- Lead, hire, and develop a high-performing engineering team; grow engineers through coaching, 1:1s, and career planning.
- Set technical direction and make architecture decisions for a data- and ML-heavy platform built for scale.
- Own end-to-end engineering delivery with a focus on velocity, reliability, and operational simplicity.
- Collaborate closely with Product on roadmap, prioritization, and customer-driven tradeoffs.
- Remain hands-on: contribute code (~30% time initially) to stay connected to the product and technical debt.
- Drive hiring roadmap and participate in recruiting to expand the team from early stages toward scale.
- Ensure systems and processes enable scaling from ~$3M to $30M ARR while handling large token and agent volumes.
Requirements:
- 8+ years in software engineering with 2+ years leading engineering teams (player-coach mindset).
- Proven track record hiring, mentoring, and scaling small engineering teams in high-growth environments.
- Strong production systems and distributed systems experience; history of building and operating large-scale services.
- Comfortable making architecture decisions spanning databases, queues, and ML/data pipelines; familiarity with TypeScript/Node/Postgres/Kubernetes a plus.
- Experience working closely with data engineering or ML teams and shipping data-driven products.
- Able to operate autonomously in a fast-moving startup, balance speed with sound technical judgment.