Senior Product Manager

Kernel•San Francisco, CA

15h

About The Position

KERNEL is hiring Product Managers to own core parts of its platform, which provides infrastructure for AI agents to use the internet through cloud browsers with identity, observability, and payments built in. Product Managers set the direction for their area and partner with engineers to determine whether it succeeds in the market. They set priorities using evidence, act as a bridge to customers and partners, scope work, build working prototypes, write persuasive specifications, and define problems as well as solve them. As KERNEL grows and technology evolves, they are expected to focus on the most important problems and identify new opportunities. The role may initially focus on Open Access, Auth + Identity, or the Enterprise Platform. Open Access concerns enabling agents to reach websites, including developer tools, site-level access measurement, verifiable signed session identities, partnerships, and standards such as Web Bot Auth. Auth + Identity concerns safe, user-authorized use of personal information, including sign-in, MFA, session persistence, credential types and integrations, and intent-bound sessions. The Enterprise Platform area supports large-scale agent workloads within customer security and compliance requirements, including data residency, customer-managed encryption keys, private networking, audit logs, admin controls, compliance programs, capacity, reliability, and SLAs. The Product Manager defines product vision, strategy, and outcome metrics; prioritizes work and measures impact; works directly with customers to identify unmet needs and broadly useful solutions; takes products to market through positioning, pricing, documentation, and go-to-market enablement; and owns adoption after launch. They build prototypes using AI to test ideas with customers and scope work before engineering begins, drive external partnerships, and work closely with engineers while influencing through data and storytelling.

Requirements

Have owned a technical product end to end and been accountable for its core metric.
Demonstrate excellent judgment and taste, including the ability to explain high-stakes decisions made with incomplete data.
Use AI coding tools to build working prototypes, read and change a codebase, and scope work in a way engineers trust.
Be technical; the company's customers are developers.
Use AI in daily work and be skilled at directing it toward high-value work.
Communicate clearly in writing and verbally with engineers, executives, and external partners.
Be excited to work on the Agentic Internet frontier, where standards are still undefined.
Be curious about how the web works, including HTTP, cookies and sessions, OAuth and OpenID Connect, CDNs, and bot management.

Nice To Haves

Founder or early-employee experience.
A career start as a software engineer.

Responsibilities

Define the product area's vision, strategy, and outcome metrics.
Prioritize product work, build solutions, and measure their impact.
Work directly with customers to uncover unmet needs and identify broadly useful product opportunities.
Take products to market by shaping positioning, pricing, and documentation, equipping go-to-market teams, and owning adoption after launch.
Build prototypes using AI to test ideas with customers and scope work before it reaches engineering.
Drive partnerships with external teams that touch the product area.
Work closely with engineers and influence through data and storytelling.
Adapt product scope to the most impactful problems and identify new opportunities as the company and technology evolve.