Engineering Manager

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 STAC ... (truncated, view full listing at source)