Rainkernel

Careers

We hire against signed work. Here is the plan.

Rainkernel is founder-led and self-funded, so there is no hiring ahead of revenue and no open role we cannot pay for twice over. The roles below open in the order the work arrives. If one of them is you, write now — the list is short and we read it first.

Write to hello@rainkernel.comHow we work

The first roles

No open roles today. These open first.

  • Senior agent engineer

    Opens when the first Build to Production is signed or the backlog reaches eight engineer-weeks — planned Q1 2027

    Owns evaluation harnesses, guardrail testing and the Governor's policies in client estates; leads readouts with the founder. Python or TypeScript, one cloud deeply, a record of shipping something that stayed up.

  • Agent engineer (two roles)

    Open after two retainers or a three-month pod placement are signed — planned Q1–Q2 2027

    Builds thin-slice agents on client data, writes the attack packs and the cost baselines, keeps the Readiness Kit honest. Two to five years of production software; no AI title required, curiosity about why pilots stall is.

  • Pod engineers for integrators

    As pods are placed

    Named engineers deputed into a consultancy's programme with our toolkit. Same bar, same tools, weekly timesheets, client-facing from week one.

What it is like

Small, technical, on the record.

Where
Hyderabad, from the Kukatpally office; client work runs in the client's cloud, so travel is rare and planned.
Hours
Monday to Friday, 09:00–21:00 IST (overlaps US East mornings, UK and EU afternoons). Calls with US clients sit in the evening; mornings are for building.
Pay
Hyderabad market rate, stated in the offer; a hire is made only when two months of that salary are already in the company account — the rule that keeps the company solvent and the job real.
Kit
The open-source engines we build on, the Readiness Kit, and a client estate to prove yourself in from the first month.
What you get to say
Engineers present readouts to clients and publish in the Lab's weekly log under their own name. Credit is public.

What we look for

The values, applied to hiring.

  • Evidence over opinion — Every claim on this site has its source one click away, and every deliverable we hand over is a measurement, not a slide. If we cannot put a number on it, we do not sell it.
  • Published prices — Nobody in this market publishes a price. We do, for every product, and a quote never exceeds the price on the page for the scope on the page.
  • Your cloud, your data, your harness — We deploy inside your estate. Evaluation sets, reports and logs are yours when we leave. We train nothing on client data and we keep no copies.
  • Fixed scope, honest exits — Every statement of work has acceptance criteria in numbers, contractual knowledge transfer, IP rights for you and a planned exit — because agents built by a vendor's forward-deployed engineers are being abandoned for the lack of exactly those.

How the week runs: scope in numbers · inside your cloud · evaluate from day one · readout, not report-out · hand over, every time. The full list is on the about page.

How to apply

One email, three things.

  1. Something you built that ran in production, with a link or a paragraph on what broke and what you did about it.
  2. Which of the roles above, and when you could start.
  3. One question about the line-up on this site that you think we have got wrong. We will answer it.

Send it to hello@rainkernel.com with the subject "Careers". Every application gets a reply, including the no's. Agencies: please don't.

Not a role — a conversation?

If you run an engineering team and want to compare notes on agents in production, the 30-minute call is open to you too.

Book a 30-minute callWrite to us