This job is brought to you by Jobs/Redefined, the UK''s leading over-50s age inclusive jobs board.TL;DRJoin 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.This role pays

£120-140k + equity , with visa sponsorship if needed, via a

4-step hiring flow : intro chat ? 2-hr take-home ? onsite deep-dive ? founder values interview.About KernelKernel is building the

source of truth for enterprise intelligence . RevOps teams at companies like

Remote, Navan, Zip, GoCardless, and Cognism

use Kernel to clean their CRMs, research companies, and target the right accounts with accuracy.The challenge is massive:

-7B tokens processed per day, 1.8M+ agents running daily, and petabytes of messy data scraped, cleaned, and enriched.

AI hallucinations are fine in chat, but not in RevOps - for us, the answer has to be correct. That means our

engineering bar is extremely high , because some of the best revenue teams in the world depend on us.We''ve raised

$15M+

from top VCs and operators at OpenAI, Slack, Snowflake, and MongoDB.Curious about the scale of the problems we''re tackling? Check out The Kernel Log!Role - Senior Platform EngineerYou''re a backend-oriented engineer with strong experience in

database infrastructure, IaC, and large-scale data systems . 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 consistencyThousands of dynamic attributes per entity

(wide-table and indexing challenges)Separation of OLTP/OLAP paths

with explicit freshness guaranteesReplication/sharding at scaleEfficient Kubernetes queueing and schedulingCost optimisation and proactive capacity planningInfrastructure-as-Code

to ensure reproducibility and automationSecure and observable infra

that meets SOC2 standardsYou''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.You would ideally have the following6+ years of backend / infra engineering experienceDeep hands-on experience with

Postgres (replication, partitioning, indexing, sharding)

at scaleStrong 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 productsAbility to operate autonomously and propose systemic fixes, not just patchworkIt would be a plus if you also haveExperience with

analytical stores (Redshift, Clickhouse, BigQuery)

alongside OLTP systemsFamiliarity with

search/retrieval infra (ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, vector DBs like Weaviate/Pinecone/FAISS)Observability and monitoring experience ( Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch )Experience in

cost modelling, queue scheduling, or infra observabilityExposure to

multi-cloud (AWS + GCP) environmentsHands-on work with

event streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, MSK)Some exposure to

LLM infra / retrieval systems

(RAG, vector DBs, hybrid serving)What you''ll be doingKernel 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.Specifically, you''ll be:Designing and scaling

real-time write/read paths

that balance OLTP and OLAP needsImplementing

IaC (Terraform or Pulumi)

across AWS/K8s for reproducible infra and faster iterationExperimenting with

schema options for wide-attribute entities

and indexing strategiesHardening

replication and data movement

between Postgres and analytical storesConsolidating and right-sizing

K8s queues , with scheduling/guardrails for heavy jobsDriving

cost efficiency

through infra modelling, observability, and autoscalingProducing key artifacts: problem registers, replication diagrams, freshness matrices, slow-query baselinesThis role may not be for you if...You want only pure product feature work - this role leans deep into infraYou need rigid structure and long-term roadmaps - many problems are still open research tracksYou''re heavily indexed on DevOps tooling but lack database/infra depthThis role is definitely not for you if ...You prefer remote/hybrid workYou don''t enjoy the intensity of early-stage startup infra firefightingYou want to manage, not buildWhat we offerWe''ll do our very best to offer you a ride of a lifetime. It won''t be easy, but it will be thrilling.Work directly with the founding teamShape infra strategy at the ground floor of a fast-growing ML-driven productBi-weekly 1:1s to help you growSalary:

£120 - 140k + equityTech stackCore DB : Postgres (JSONB, partitioning, pglogical, replication strategies)Analytics : Redshift, Clickhouse (evaluated for OLTP/OLAP split)Infra : AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform/Pulumi for IaC, n8n for workflow automationBackend : NodeJS, TypescriptFront-end : NextJS, Typescript, TailwindTeamFara Ashiru, Head of EngineeringSam Houghton, Founding EngineerEleanor Leung, Sr EngineerTom Ankers, Sr EngineerWillis Chou, Sr EngineerDavid Saltares, Sr EngineerStefan Sabev, Head of ProductVisasWe sponsor visas for exceptional candidatesInterview ProcessSTAGE 1A 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 2A 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 4Come 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 STAGEAnders (Founder + CEO) and 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!

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