Backend Engineer
Department: Engineering
Location: San Francisco, Cincinnati, Seattle, New York
Compensation: $175K – $250K • 0.1% – 0.35%
Employment Type: FullTime
About Kernel
Kernel is a developer platform that provides Crazy Fast Browsers-as-a-Service for browser automations and web agents. Our API and MCP server allow developers to instantly launch browsers in the cloud without managing infrastructure.
Our serverless browser platform handles the hard stuff: autoscaling reliable browser infrastructure, observability, and the messy details of web interaction so developers can focus on what their agents do, not how they do it. Kernel makes AI tangible, practical, and powerful, allowing developers to deploy agents that can truly interact with the digital world.
We’re used by teams at Cash App, Rye, and countless others for tasks like deep research, QA automation, and real-time web analysis. We've raised $22M from Accel, YCombinator, Vercel, Paul Graham, Solomon Hykes (Docker), David Cramer (Sentry), Charlie Marsh (Astral), and more.
One line of code deploys any web agent to our cloud. The rest is up to you. If you're interested in building critical infrastructure for the next generation of AI applications, we'd love to chat.
About the role
As a 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.
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
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.
What you can expect as a Kernel
Industry-competitive salary
Above market equity
Premium medical + dental coverage + dependent coverage
Small, trusting team of senior + staff engineers
Default async with minimal bureaucracy, only one meeting a week
$1k / mo budget for LLM usage fees #vibecheck
Daily lunches on us
Unlimited PTO
401k + company match
Relocation assistance
Hiring process
We have a simple process focused on real world collaboration and jointly getting to know each other:
30-minute intro call with one of Kernel’s co-founders
45-minute technical interview (virtual)
Half-day on-site (virtual or in-person) working with our team on relevant challenges.
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