Engineering Leader (VPE/CTO)

About Kernel

Kernel enables revenue teams to research companies as if they had unlimited time. We’re growing extremely fast and working with many of the best revenue teams in the world like Remote.com, Navan, Zip, GoCardless, Cognism, and many more. Previously, revenue teams relied on manual research to understand if a company had the problem they solved: Do job descriptions indicate doing what you automate? Who do they sell to? Is non-public financial data estimated to the right size? And what does this data tell me about their corporate card spend? Their travel expenses?

Our customers use Kernel to find this for every relevant company in the world to get complete overviews of ideal customers and pursue the right companies.We’re a team of second-time founders and have raised $5mm+ (more announcements coming soon...) from top VCs and revenue leaders at Open AI, Slack, Snowflake, and MongoDB.

About You

In short: 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.
• You are excited to participate in cross-functional conversations about go-to-market, hiring and strategy.

The Role

The challenge

As we scale, our technology must keep up alongside our commercial progress. To date, our biggest challenge has been that customisation is part of our value proposition. We have solved this challenge by:

• Doing things manually to understand the nuances of the data we collect (we have a Product Ops team focused on this).
• Thinking about scalable ways to collect data whilst allowing for customisation. For example, all our customers use job post data, but what they want from job posts vary.

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.

You’ll report to our Co-founder and CEO Anders and be part of the leadership team.

To achieve this, you will be:

• Coordinating with our product and commercial teams to make sure our technology strategy, architecture, and teams are aligned to our goals.
• Leading the engineering team, and enabling them to do their most impactful work.
• Evaluating and influencing our infrastructure and roadmap direction.

🛠️ Tech stack

• Back-end (AWS): NodeJS, Typescript, Postgres
• Front-end: NextJS, Typescript, Tailwind
• Workflow automation: n8n

Team ❤️

We are currently 15 people with 3 people in engineering and 1 Product Manager, specifically

• Sam Houghton, Founding Engineer
• Eleanor Leung, Sr Engineer
• David Saltares, Sr Engineer
• Marcus Henglein, Product Manager

What we offer

We’ll do our very best to offer you the ride of a lifetime. It won’t be easy, but it will be thrilling.

• A fast-paced ride in the early inning of a new technology wave
• Work closely with our Co-founder and CEO Anders Krohn and be part of the leadership team.
• Holidays: 24 days plus bank holidays
• Pension: 5% from you, +3% contribution from Kernel
• Salary: £150k - £225k
• Equity: 1-2.5% equity

We value the pace in-person work gives at this early stage. We expect our engineering leader to be work from the office at least 4 days per week, with some flexibility.

Interview process ☎️

• STAGE 1: An intro call with our CEO Anders. You’ll get an overview of Kernel, speak a bit about your own motivations, plus an opportunity to ask questions.
• STAGE 2: An in-person architecture discussion with our team. It’s an opportunity for us to understand your thinking and ability to reason and iterate on the design of complicated systems architecture.
• STAGE 3: An in-person leadership interview with Marcus and Sam. This will be an opportunity for us to understand your decision-making and collaboration skills in the context of real commercial and technical scenarios you would face in the role.
• STAGE 4: A values interview with Anders and Marcus.

If there’s excitement on both sides, we’ll make you an offer!