---
title: 'Senior Product Manager at Kernel'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-kernel-san-francisco-6b7nzndgdybp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-08'
---

# Senior Product Manager at Kernel

- **Company:** Kernel
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/usekernel/bfe58719-6d39-4f54-9664-9befa0c81f85

## Job description

## About KERNEL

KERNEL is infrastructure for AI agents to use the internet. Agents buy things, run back-office operations and test apps on KERNEL cloud browsers designed for performance, reliability and scale, with identity, observability and payments built in. KERNEL works with any agent harness or model and is trusted by Town, Middesk, Framer, Vercel and more than 20,000 teams. Founded in 2025, we are backed by $22M+ from top investors including Accel and Y Combinator. Our vision is to be the Internet runtime for agents. Agent traffic now outpaces human traffic. The web needs new rails for access, identity, and trust and we’re building them.

## The role

We're hiring Product Managers to own core parts of KERNEL's platform. This job description covers several PM roles across the problem spaces below. Our engineers work with high agency and bring strong product intuition. You’ll set the direction for your area and, with your engineering partners, own whether it succeeds in the market. That means setting priorities, persuading with evidence, and acting as KERNEL's bridge to customers and partners. You'll scope your work, build working prototypes, and write persuasive specs. You'll define problems as often as you solve them. As KERNEL grows and the technology evolves, you’ll move toward the most important problems and spot new opportunities before anyone asks. Your scope will follow the most impactful work.

Where you might focus You'll likely start in one of the areas below.

- Open Access. Can an agent reach the sites it needs? Some things you might work on: shipping new features that give developers tools to unlock more websites; measuring access per site; creating a signed session identity that website operators can verify; building partnerships with merchants and bot-management and CDN providers; developing standards like Web Bot Auth.
- Auth + Identity. When a session acts for a person, who is that person, and how can an agent safely use that person's information on the Internet? Some things you might work on: user-approved sign-in, MFA, and session persistence; extending our Vaults primitive to capture more credential types; credential-manager integrations; designing what authorized, intent-bound sessions with KERNEL might look like.
- Enterprise Platform. Can our enterprise customers run agent workloads on KERNEL at scale, within their security and compliance requirements? Some things you might work on: offering data residency in the regions our customers operate in; customer-managed encryption keys and private networking; audit logs and admin controls that pass enterprise security reviews; compliance programs such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001; capacity, reliability, and SLAs for customers running browsers at very high concurrency.

You will:

- Define your product area's vision, strategy, and outcome metrics. Prioritize, build, and measure impact.
- Delight customers by working with them directly, uncovering unmet needs, and identifying opportunities to build broadly useful solutions.
- Take what you build to market: shape positioning, pricing, and docs, equip GTM, and own adoption after launch.
- Build prototypes yourself with AI, and use them to test ideas with customers and scope work before it reaches engineering.
- Drive partnerships with external teams that touch your product area.
- Work closely with our engineers, and influence through data and storytelling.

## What we're looking for

- You've owned a technical product end to end and you were accountable for its core metric.
- For most people that means 4+ years as a PM, but we care more about ownership than years. Founder or early-employee experience is a plus.
- You have excellent judgment and taste. You’ve made high-stakes calls with incomplete data, and you can walk us through how you made them.
- You ship. You use AI coding tools to turn an idea into a working prototype, you can read and change a codebase, and engineers trust your scoping.
- Our customers are developers, so strong PM candidates are technical and may even have started their career as a software engineer.
- You use AI in your daily work, and are skilled at steering AI to accelerate on the most high-value work.
- You have strong communication ability, both written and verbal. You write clearly enough for an engineer, an executive, and an external partner to understand.
- You are excited to work on the frontier of the Agentic Internet, where standards are still undefined. You have the curiosity to go deep on how the web works: HTTP, cookies and sessions, OAuth and OpenID Connect, CDNs, and bot management.

## 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
- Daily lunches on us
- Unlimited PTO
- 401k + company match
- Relocation assistance

[​](https://www.onkernel.com/docs/careers/browser-security-engineer#how-to-apply)

## About Kernel

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Kernel builds crazy fast, open-source infrastructure for AI agents to access and interact with the internet using cloud-hosted browsers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Rafael Garcia (Co-Founder & CEO) and Catherine Jue (Co-Founder & CTO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: AI Infrastructure / Developer Tools / Browser Automation
- Target customers: B2B – engineering teams building web agents, browser automations, and AI applications (trusted by Cash App, Framer, Rye, and 3,000+ teams)
- Mission or purpose: To make cloud infrastructure 100x better by providing well-designed, opinionated tooling that unlocks superpowers for the next generation of AI applications.

## Products & Services
- **Kernel Browser API**: An API to instantly launch sandboxed, cloud-based Chromium browsers in under 30ms (cold start) with sub-150ms cold starts on managed headful browsers. Supports headless, stealth, GPU, and profile modes. Integrates with Playwright, Puppeteer, Browser Use, and Computer Use frameworks.
- **Stealth Mode**: Built-in residential proxies and automatic CAPTCHA solving for web agents.
- **Observability Suite**: Session recording (live view), video replays (MP4), full logs, and screenshots for debugging.
- **Agent Runtime (App Platform)**: A serverless compute service to deploy and invoke agent loops on demand or via scheduled events, co-located with browsers to minimize latency.
- **Auth & Session Management**: Persistent sessions that maintain cookies and auth across invocations; managed authentication for agents.
- **Open-Source SDKs & Tools**: `kernel-images` (Go, 924 stars), `hypeman` (multi-hypervisor VM runtime), `kernel-mcp-server` (MCP server for browser automation), CLI, and Node SDK.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$22M** (Series A led by Accel, backed by Y Combinator S25 batch)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Accel, Y Combinator (S25), Tyler Bosmeny (Primary Partner at YC). Trusted by Cash App, Framer, Rye, and 3,000+ teams.
- **Growth Signals**: Raised $22M in Series A shortly after founding in 2025; Y Combinator batch S25; trusted by major fintech and design platforms; open-source repos gaining traction (kernel-images at 924 stars); team growing from 6 to ~15 employees rapidly.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Performance Moat**: Sub-30ms browser spin-ups and sub-150ms cold starts on managed browsers – significantly faster than competitors.
- **Open-Source Core**: Transparent, community-driven development with 61 public repos, fostering trust and adoption.
- **Full-Stack Observability**: Live view, video replays, and logs built-in from day one – not an afterthought.
- **Stealth & Compliance**: Built-in residential proxies, auto-CAPTCHA solving, SOC 2 compliant, and HIPAA-ready.
- **Founder-Market Fit**: CEO Rafael Garcia was co-founder/CTO of Clever (YC S12, exited for $500M), bringing deep infrastructure and scaling experience. CTO Catherine Jue was co-founder of Sway Finance (YC S16) and led Cash App’s forward-deployed engineering team.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling the browser infrastructure platform to support more AI agent frameworks and use cases
- Expanding the open-source ecosystem and developer community
- Building out the agent runtime platform for serverless deployment
- Deepening enterprise partnerships and compliance certifications
- Growing the engineering team to accelerate product development

## Why Work Here
- **Early-stage impact**: Join a well-funded Series A startup (15 employees) backed by top-tier investors – opportunity to shape the product and culture from an early stage
- **Founding team pedigree**: Work alongside founders who have built and exited a $500M company (Clever) and led engineering at Cash App
- **Technical challenges**: Build cutting-edge infrastructure for AI agents – browser virtualization, stealth proxies, serverless compute, and observability at scale
- **Open-source culture**: 61 public repos, active community engagement, and commitment to transparent development
- **Work environment**: In-office culture based in San Francisco (4 locations in the US), with a focus on well-designed tooling and developer experience
- **Perks**: Competitive compensation at a well-funded startup; perks and benefits typical of an early-stage YC company (details available on Built In)
- **Current openings**: Infrastructure Engineer, Product Engineer, Backend Engineer, DevRel Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Customer Engineer – indicating strong growth and diverse team needs

## Sources
1. [Y Combinator – Kernel Profile](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kernel)
2. [GitHub – Kernel Organization](http://github.com/kernel)
3. [Kernel Documentation](https://www.kernel.sh/docs)
4. [StartupHub.ai – Usekernel Profile](https://www.startuphub.ai/startups/usekernel)
5. [Built In – Kernel Jobs & Careers](https://builtin.com/company/kernel-kernel-sh/jobs)

## Other roles at Kernel

- [People Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-lead-kernel-san-francisco-36zypgj3wh8s) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Content Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-content-engineer-kernel-san-francisco-jx6jjsh5dqnm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-kernel-san-francisco-7h92f9x7djp1) — San Francisco, CA
- [Solutions Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-kernel-san-francisco-ktmzc02qgxvg) — San Francisco, CA
- [Browser Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/browser-security-engineer-kernel-san-francisco-68rz5wz2dyyp) — San Francisco, CA
- [Developer Advocate](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-advocate-kernel-san-francisco-4x6qjb4k8rk1) — San Francisco, CA
- [DevRel Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/devrel-engineer-kernel-san-francisco-av6mcvxrf9xm) — San Francisco, CA
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