• 🌆 Location: SF or Cincinnati
  • 💰 Salary: $175,000 - $235,000 + 2% equity
  • ⏳ Years of experience: 5+
  • 💻 Skills: Bun / Typescript, Go, Stainless, MySQL (PlanetScale)

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About Kernel

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 serverless platform handles the hard stuff: autoscaling reliable browser infrastructure, observability, and enabling human-in-the-loop interactions in production. If you’re interested in building critical infrastructure for the next generation of AI applications, we’d love to chat.

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About the role

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.

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What you’ll do

  • 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

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What we’re looking for

  • 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.

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What you can expect as a Kernel

  • Industry-competitive salary
  • Above market equity—first 5 hires bookmarked for 10% of company’s equity pool
  • Premium medical + dental coverage + dependent coverage
  • Small, trusting team of senior + staff engineers
  • Default async—minimal bureaucracy, only one meeting a week
  • $1k / mo budget for LLM usage fees #vibecheck
  • Daily lunches on us
  • Unlimited PTO
  • 401k + company match

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Hiring process

We have a simple process focused on real world collaboration and jointly getting to know each other:
  1. 30 minute intro calls with each of Kernel’s co-founders (1 hour total)
  2. Half-day on-site (virtual or in-person) working with our team and co-founders on relevant technical challenges.
  3. Offer!

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How to apply

Message @catherine jue on Discord and include:
  1. Your resumé
  2. Past projects, work, and GitHub
We can’t wait to hear from you!