Founding Product Designer

Kernel provides enterprise RevOps teams with AI-powered company data for their CRMs. We raised $14M in Series A funding from top VCs and operators at Plaid, OpenAI, and Slack to build an AI-native alternative to Dun & Bradstreet's entity and hierarchy data.

RevOps teams at Navan, Gong, Mistral, and AlphaSense use Kernel to run their organizations.

At Kernel, we process 7B+ tokens a day and run 1.8M+ agents daily, all on an architecture that’s intentionally simple: one database, one queue. It’s minimalism built for massive scale (For reference, Wikipedia has 2.3B tokens in the English wikipedia). Our queue processes a daily volume on par with the entire Visa network’s transactions (~365M/day). All of which has been built by a small but mighty team of engineers.

You’ll be Kernel’s Founding Product Designer - a foundational hire with end-to-end ownership of core product UX.

Your mission: simplify complexity. Make a powerful product feel effortless: clearer workflows, sharper mental models, fewer decisions, more confidence.

• Own core UX end-to-end: flows, IA, interaction design, and visual craft.

• Run ground-truth discovery: lead user interviews, synthesize fast, turn insight into shipped changes.

• Prototype quickly: use whatever gets to a high-signal prototype (Figma, v0, Figma Make, etc.).

• Ship with engineering + PM: tight loops, high quality in production, iterate fast.

• Build the design foundation: principles, patterns, lightweight system - without slowing the team down.

• 5% “other stuff”: occasional help with decks/narrative when it moves the business.

• Founding designer experience is a plus, but not a requirement - what matters most is that you have early-stage startup experience and can point to tangible examples of transforming a business through design.

• You’ve shipped meaningful product work and can walk through decisions + outcomes.

• You’re strong at simplifying complexity (not just polishing UI).

• You can run discovery independently and get to the truth.

• You move fast, communicate clearly, and collaborate tightly with engineers.

• You have taste and execution: prototype → production details.

• Need other designers to work best.

• Need perfect clarity before starting.

• Prefer long cycles and big “reveals.”

• Want fully remote work (we move faster in-person).

We will do our best to offer you a ride of a lifetime. It will not be easy, but it will be thrilling.

• 💰 Salary: £120,000 – £180,000 base + equity

• 🗓️ 24 days holiday per year + bank holidays

• ✈️ 2 weeks work-from-anywhere

• 💼 Pension plan

• 💻 Top-spec equipment and central London office

• 🏆 High-autonomy, high-trust environment with a small team shipping at pace

• 🍽️ Free dinner at the office

• 🎉 Team events and dinners

• 🚀 Work directly with the founders to scale the systems that power enterprise AI

We sponsor visas for exceptional candidates and provide relocation support for those moving to London.

Stage 1: Introductory Call with De-Vene (45 minutes)

Stage 2: Founding Team Conversation with Marcus (30 min)

Stage 3: Take-Home Assessment with Remote Working Session with Stefan & Sam (60 minutes)

Final Stage: Founders Interview - A conversation with Anders (CEO) and Marcus (co-founder) focused on values alignment and long-term vision (45 minutes).

Following Mutual Fit: Reference checks and offer stage.