Senior Platform Engineer, Kernel AI

• You’re a backend-oriented engineer with strong experience in database infrastructure, IaC, and large-scale data systems
• You’ll thrive if you enjoy getting deep into DB internals, replication flows, and scaling infra for ML/data-heavy workloads — while still being comfortable in a fast-moving product environment
• 6+ years of backend / infra engineering experience
• Deep hands-on experience with Postgres (replication, partitioning, indexing, sharding) at scale
• Strong background in AWS (Aurora/RDS, S3, EKS/Kubernetes, networking, autoscaling, cost control)
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent)
• Experience working with large-scale data pipelines, ideally in ML or analytics-heavy products
• Ability to operate autonomously and propose systemic fixes, not just patchwork

Desirable

• Join Kernel as an in-office, backend-savvy Senior Platform Engineer to own and scale our Postgres, AWS, and Kubernetes stack. You’ll solve bottlenecks around high-volume writes, wide-attribute data models, replication, and real-time vs analytical data paths while bringing Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or Pulumi) practices to productionize and automate our infra
• You’ll work closely with our product and engineering teams to ensure Kernel’s infra can handle:
• High-volume OLTP writes with immediate read-after-write consistency
• Thousands of dynamic attributes per entity (wide-table and indexing challenges)
• Separation of OLTP/OLAP paths with explicit freshness guarantees
• Replication/sharding at scale
• Efficient Kubernetes queueing and scheduling
• Cost optimisation and proactive capacity planning
• Infrastructure-as-Code to ensure reproducibility and automation
• Secure and observable infra that meets SOC2 standards
• Kernel processes millions of accounts, petabytes of data, and millions of parallel agent executions every day
• Your role will be to own our infra scaling journey, from Postgres schema design to AWS autoscaling to replication flows, making sure our systems stay fast, reliable, and cost-efficient as we grow
• Designing and scaling real-time write/read paths that balance OLTP and OLAP needs
• Implementing IaC (Terraform or Pulumi) across AWS/K8s for reproducible infra and faster iteration
• Experimenting with schema options for wide-attribute entities and indexing strategies
• Hardening replication and data movement between Postgres and analytical stores
• Consolidating and right-sizing K8s queues, with scheduling/guardrails for heavy jobs
• Driving cost efficiency through infra modelling, observability, and autoscaling
• Producing key artifacts: problem registers, replication diagrams, freshness matrices, slow-query baselines
• ❤️ Team
• Fara Ashiru, Head of Engineering
• Sam Houghton, Founding Engineer
• Eleanor Leung, Sr Engineer
• Tom Ankers, Sr Engineer
• Willis Chou, Sr Engineer
• David Saltares, Sr Engineer
• Stefan Sabev, Head of Product

• 4-step hiring flow: intro chat → 2-hr take-home → onsite deep-dive → founder values interview
• STAGE 1
• A 45 minute intro call with Fara (Hiring Manager). You’ll get an overview of Kernel, speak a bit about your own motivations, what you’re good at (and not so good!) plus an opportunity to ask questions
• STAGE 2
• A take-home task where you’ll be asked to solve a real-world problem we’ve come across. You’ll spend a maximum of 2 hours on this challenge
• STAGE 4
• Come to our office for a 45-min technical interview. We’ll work through your take-home task and ask clarifying questions to understand your thinking
• FINAL STAGE
• Anders (Founder + CEO) & Macus conduct our Founders interview. It’s a values-based discussion exploring your personal and professional values and how they align with ours.If you like us and we like you, it’ll be time to make you a job offer after reference checks!