Senior Platform Engineer

About Kernel

Kernel gives enterprise RevOps teams confidence in their CRM data.

We’ve raised a $14M Series A from top VCs and operators at Plaid, OpenAI, Slack and others to build the AI-native alternative to Dun & Bradstreet’s entity and hierarchy data.

RevOps teams at Gong, Navan, Zip, Remote and GoCardless use Kernel to clean, enrich and complete their CRM data at enterprise scale, eliminating duplicates, fixing hierarchies and restoring trust in the foundation that powers forecasting, territory planning and AI initiatives.

Our platform combines entity-level intelligence with mass-action tooling to give RevOps teams the data quality and control needed to plan confidently and deploy AI successfully.

The Role

You are a backend-oriented engineer with strong experience in database infrastructure, IaC, and large-scale data systems. You will work closely with product and engineering to ensure Kernel’s infrastructure can handle massive data and parallel execution at scale.

You thrive in a fast-moving environment where solving complex data and scaling challenges is the norm, and you enjoy thinking deeply about systems reliability, cost efficiency, and performance.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Designing and scaling real-time write/read paths balancing OLTP and OLAP needs

• Implementing Infrastructure-as-Code for reproducibility and rapid iteration

• Optimizing Postgres replication, sharding, and indexing strategies

• Improving data flow between operational and analytical stores

• Hardening Kubernetes queues and scheduling heavy jobs efficiently

• Ensuring system observability and SOC2-level reliability

• Driving cost efficiency through infra modelling and autoscaling

• Producing technical artifacts: replication diagrams, freshness matrices, baselines

What You Bring

• 6+ years of backend or infrastructure engineering experience

• Hands-on experience with Postgres replication, partitioning, indexing, sharding

• Strong background in AWS (Aurora/RDS, S3, EKS, autoscaling, networking)

• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent)

• Exposure to large-scale data pipelines or ML workloads

• Comfort working autonomously and solving systemic infra issues

It is a plus if you also have:

• Experience with analytical databases (Redshift, Clickhouse, BigQuery)

• Familiarity with search/retrieval infra (Elasticsearch, vector DBs)

• Monitoring and observability experience (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus)

• Knowledge of event streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis)

• Understanding of RAG or hybrid retrieval systems

⚠️ This role may not be for you if you:

• Want only pure product feature work — this role leans deep into infra

• Need long-term roadmaps and heavy structure

• Focus mainly on DevOps tooling without database fundamentals

❌ This role is definitely not for you if you:

• Prefer fully remote work (this role requires at least 3 days a week in the office)

• Don’t enjoy high-intensity infra challenges in an early-stage environment

• Want to manage rather than build

What We Offer

We will do our best to offer you a ride of a lifetime. It will not be easy, but it will be thrilling.

• 💰 Salary: £120,000 – £200,000 + equity

• 🗓️ 24 days holiday per year + bank holidays

• ✈️ 2 weeks work-from-anywhere

• 💼 Pension plan

• 💻 Top-spec equipment and central London office

• 🍽️ Free dinner at the office

• 🎉 Team events and dinners

• 🚀 Work directly with the founders to scale the systems that power enterprise AI

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Core DB: Postgres (partitioning, replication, JSONB)

• Infra: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Pulumi

• Analytics: Redshift, Clickhouse

• Backend: NodeJS, TypeScript

• Workflow automation: n8n

❤️ Team

• Fara Ashiru, Head of Engineering

• Sam Houghton, Founding Engineer

• Eleanor Leung, Senior Engineer

• David Saltares, Senior Engineer

• Stefan Sabev, Head of Product

• Tom Ankers, Senior Engineer

• Willis Chou, Senior Engineer

🎫 Visas & Relocation

We sponsor visas for exceptional candidates and provide relocation support for those moving to London.

Interview Process

Stage 1 – 30-minute intro call with Sandi to discuss motivations and strengths.

Stage 2 – Take-home task (≤ 4 hours).

Stage 3 – 90-minute technical interview reviewing your solution in our London office.

Final Stage – Founders interview with Anders (CEO) and Marcus to explore values alignment.

If there is mutual fit, we move to references and offer.