Engineering Manager

Job description

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 nuanc…