Senior Software Engineer

📋 Description

• • Own and scale Kernel’s AWS Kubernetes backbone as we rocket from £1 M to £10 M ARR. You’ll architect, secure, and automate the entire stack—from VPC design to Helm charts—so that every new customer can onboard without a hitch and every data pipeline can burst to tens of thousands of parallel executions.
• • Ship production-grade backend features at startup speed. Using NodeJS/TypeScript and Postgres, you’ll turn product ideas into pull requests within days, instrument them with metrics, and iterate with real user feedback before the ink is dry on the roadmap.
• • Be the bridge between infrastructure and product. When the sales team dreams up a new signal to extract from millions of web pages, you’ll decide whether we scale horizontally with Karpenter, push work into Lambda, or refactor the job queue—then code the change yourself.
• • Automate everything that can be automated. From CI/CD in GitHub Actions to self-healing deployments in Argo CD, from cost-optimised S3 lifecycles to n8n workflows that turn manual ops tasks into one-click buttons, you’ll leave a trail of runbooks no-one needs to read.
• • Keep data flowing at petabyte scale. You’ll tune Postgres indexes, partition tables, and choose between Aurora Serverless and Redshift based on query patterns, ensuring that our research engine returns insights in milliseconds, not minutes.
• • Collaborate in a tight, high-trust loop. Daily stand-ups with the 4-person engineering squad, weekly 1:1s with Head of Engineering Fara, and ad-hoc whiteboard sessions with the founders mean decisions are made quickly and your voice carries real weight.
• • Champion reliability and security. You’ll define SLIs/SLOs, set up chaos testing, rotate secrets with AWS Secrets Manager, and ensure SOC-2 readiness so enterprise customers can trust us with their most sensitive data.
• • Influence the roadmap. Founders Anders and Marcus expect engineers to argue for the next big bet—whether that’s fine-tuning an LLM for summarisation or moving part of the stack to Rust for performance—and you’ll build the prototypes to prove it.
• • Mentor and be mentored. While this is an IC role, you’ll pair with junior engineers, review pull requests daily, and absorb battle stories from second-time founders who’ve scaled companies before.
• • Thrive in a low-structure, high-intensity environment. If you see a flaky test or a runaway cloud bill at 6 pm, you’ll fix it before breakfast the next day—because ownership is not a buzzword here, it’s how we win.