Senior Backend Systems Engineer

Kernel is building the data backbone for commercial real estate — converting messy CRE documents into structured, decision-ready data using ML and distributed systems. It’s a $20T+ market still trapped in PDFs and siloed tools, so the impact is immediate and real.

We’re an engineering-first company — our technical breakthroughs set the direction for what we can commercialize. Our team is small, senior, and high-trust. Every engineer owns production systems and directly shapes the platform’s capabilities.

You’ll design and own backend systems powering AI-driven pipelines: async FastAPI services, SQLAlchemy 2.x models, event-driven ingestion workflows (Pulsar/Kafka), multi-tenant auth (OIDC/JWT), Kubernetes deployments, and full observability.

Stack: Python 3.12+, FastAPI, AsyncIO, SQLAlchemy 2.x, Pulsar/Kafka, OIDC/JWT, Kubernetes, GitOps/Terraform, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus.

Comp: $150k–$200k + up to 3% equity