Kraken Technologies on cord

Kraken Technologies

Lead Software Engineer

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Kraken Technologies?
EnviroTech · Sustainability
Driving the global green energy revolution through transformational EnTech. Part of the Octopus Energy Group.
Active
6 months ago
Posted
3 weeks ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
5 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Back End
Experience level: Lead
Core skills considered: Artificial Intelligence, AWS, Cloud Computing, Security and Compliance
Other skills considered: Security Testing, Machine Learning, Python, Technical Direction

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We're hiring a Lead Software Engineer to head our newly formed Agent Safety/Evals team. As AI agents take on more autonomous tasks across Kraken's internal workflows, this role is critical to ensuring they do so securely and predictably.

This is a leadership role focused on constraining our internally facing AI agents to an expected operation space and guaranteeing system reliability.

You will define the technical strategy for how we evaluate models, enforce safety guardrails, and govern AI behavior across internal platforms, skills, and harnesses. You'll work closely with the broader AI Foundations team and engineers across Kraken to ensure that our push for rapid AI adoption in internal tooling never compromises on security, determinism, or quality.


What you'll own

  • Lead the technical direction for internal agent safety: Design and implement systems focused on the reliability, security, and determinism of LLMs and autonomous agents, constraining them strictly to expected operational spaces within our internal ecosystems.
  • Build robust evaluation frameworks: Develop scalable harnesses and evals tailored to internal workflows and skills. You will be responsible for asking the right types of questions about the quality and reproducibility of our evals, while engineering the systems to measure them robustly.
  • Implement guardrails and governance: Create and enforce pre- and post-generation guardrails, managing the overarching governance of AI models operating within internal tools and platforms.
  • Drive AI security and observability: Build out dedicated auth/permissions for internal AI agents, establish deep monitoring/observability pipelines, and define incident response protocols for AI-specific anomalies.
  • Verification and Red Teaming: Lead continuous verification efforts and red teaming exercises to proactively identify vulnerabilities, prompt injections, or unpredictable behaviours in our internal AI implementations.
  • Operate in AWS: Deploy, run, and support high-throughput, low-latency safety services for internal use cases; make sensible architecture/cost tradeoffs; partner effectively with platform/techops/security stakeholders.

What you bring to the party

  • Strong technical leadership: Proven experience leading technical initiatives or teams, capable of setting the technical vision for complex, ambiguous domains.
  • Deep software engineering fundamentals: Senior/advanced capability in designing secure components end-to-end, testing thoroughly, and reasoning heavily about system design, concurrency, and architecture tradeoffs. (Python preferred).
  • Expertise in AI Evaluation and Safety: A highly critical thinker who understands the nuances of LLM behavior. You must be comfortable interrogating the quality of AI outputs and deeply experienced in building harnesses to measure it reproducibly.
  • Security and Governance mindset: Experience with threat modeling, authentication, red teaming, or building guardrails for internal systems, tooling, or platforms.
  • Cloud experience (AWS): Comfortable running internal services, owning reliability/scalability, and collaborating with platform/techops/security partners.
  • Excellent communication: Able to synthesize complex safety and eval metrics into actionable insights for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What Success Looks Like

  • Confidence in Internal Tooling: Engineers across Kraken can deploy new autonomous models, AI skills, and internal agents with total confidence, knowing they are bound by reliable safety guardrails and strict operational constraints within our internal ecosystems.
  • High-Quality Internal Evals: You have established a culture and infrastructure of robust, highly reproducible evaluation metrics that accurately reflect the real-world performance and safety of our internal-facing AI tooling and harnesses.
  • Resilient Internal Infrastructure: AI security, monitoring, and incident response are treated as first-class citizens, ensuring that any erratic agent behavior in our internal platforms is immediately caught and mitigated before it affects broader operations.
  • Technical Leadership: Strong collaboration across AI Foundations helps accelerate secure internal AI adoption; you are actively mentoring engineers and shaping the company's internal AI governance strategy.

Bonus points

  • Experience with specific LLM evaluation and safety frameworks (e.g., Inspect AI, Ragas, OpenAI Evals, NeMo Guardrails).
  • Django experience and strong backend engineering patterns (security, performance, maintainability).
  • Experience with Datadog for complex observability, tracing, and monitoring in AI environments.
  • Familiarity with foundational AI engineering tooling like Pydantic AI, LiteLLM, or LangChain.

Company Benefits

  • Wondering what the salary for our roles?Just ask us! On a call with one of our recruiters it's something we always cover as we genuinely want to match your experience with the correct salary. The reason why we don't advertise is because we honestly have a degree of flexibility and would never want salary to be a reason why someone doesn't apply to Octopus - what's more important to us is finding the right octofit!
  • Octopus Energy is a unique culture. An organisation where people learn, decide, and build quicker. Where people work with autonomy, alongside a wide range of amazing co-owners, on projects that break new ground. We want your hard work to be rewarded with perks you actually care about!
  • View all our perks [What do you get? Click here]
Lead Software Engineer at Kraken Technologies
Position posted 3 weeks ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
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