Lead Software Engineer - Agent Safety Software Engineering 🖥️ Backend Engineering London London Berlin Paris Manchester Full-time Help us use technology to make a big green dent in the universe! Kraken powers some of the most innovative global developments in energy. We’re a technology company focused on creating a smart, sustainable energy system. From optimising renewable generation, creating a more intelligent grid and enabling utilities to provide excellent customer experiences, our operating system for energy is transforming the industry around the world in a way that benefits everyone. It’s a really exciting time in energy. Help us make a real impact on shaping a better, more sustainable future. Kraken is a certified Great Place to Work in France, Germany, Spain, Japan, Australia, and USA. In the UK we are one of the Best Workplaces on Glassdoor with a score of 4.5, and in Germany we rate 4.7 on Kununu as a Top Company. Check out our Welcome to the Jungle site (FR/EN) to learn more about our teams and culture. Are you ready for a career with us? We want to ensure you have all the tools and environment you need to unleash your potential. If you have any specific accommodations or a unique preference, please contact us at inclusion@kraken.tech and we'll do what we can to customise your interview process for comfort and maximum magic! Studies have shown that some groups of people, like women, are less likely to apply to a role unless they meet 100% of the job requirements. Whoever you are, if you like one of our jobs, we encourage you to apply as you might just be the candidate we hire. Across Kraken, we're looking for genuinely decent people who are honest and empathetic. Our people are our strongest asset and the unique skills and perspectives people bring to the team are the driving force of our success. As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute. We consider all applicants without regard to race, colour, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status. Our (i) Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Notice, (ii) Website Privacy Notice and (iii) Cookie Notice govern the collection and use of your personal data in connection with your application and use of our website. These policies explain how we handle your data and outline your rights under applicable laws, including, but not limited to, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Depending on your location, you may have the right to access, correct, or delete your information, object to processing, or withdraw consent. By applying, you acknowledge that you’ve read, understood and consent to these terms 🚀 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.

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