Backend Engineer

Kernel•San Francisco, CA

32d

About The Position

We’re building the developer platform that lets AI agents use applications, starting with browsers. Our edge is an infrastructure platform that’s extensible, observable, and built for scale from day one. Our platform handles the hard stuff: spinning up browsers quickly and efficiently at scale, providing great observability into their activity, and enabling both humans and AI agents to interact with them. If you’re interested in building critical infrastructure for the next generation of AI applications, we’d love to chat. As Founding Backend Engineer at Kernel, you’ll architect and build the core systems that power our AI agent platform end-to-end. You’ll own critical developer-focused products from conception to production, working with bleeding edge tech that needs to be both reliable and low latency. You’ll also play a foundational role in how we build Kernel’s culture.

Requirements

Experience building extensible APIs, SDKs, and databases designed for scale and high throughput
>=1 year of experience at a company with <50 people
Technical excellence: we’re building core infrastructure that’s default open source. As a developer tool, our technical decisions are the product, and the details matter a lot.
Low ego, high impact: you care more about building something meaningful than who gets credit
Start-up ready: early stage sometimes means figuring it out as we go, and that energizes rather than drains you
Excited to crush it: we’re moving fast and looking for people excited about high velocity, high impact work, and having fun along the way.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and scale new our product suite of developer tools, CLIs, and APIs
Set direction for critical technical surface areas, enabling us to stay ahead of rapid growth
Shape Kernel’s hiring decisions and culture as we grow