About Us
Kokoro is an award-winning consumer insights agency helping brands understand what people really think and feel. We've been named Agency of the Year three times, won Best Place to Work at the MRS Awards, and work with clients from startups to household names like BT and Sainsbury's.
We're now building something new: an AI-powered platform that transforms how teams interact with rich consumer data through natural language. Think ChatGPT meets market research — and we need a talented engineer to help us build it.
The Role
We’re looking for a Product Engineer to join our small, technical team building Kokoro’s AI platform from the ground up. This is a systems-level role for a generalist who understands how frontend, backend, databases, caches, cloud resources, and deployment all fit together.
You’ll work across the full stack, building and maintaining vector embedding retrieval engines, AI chat interfaces with agent orchestration, and the infrastructure that ties it all together. We value high-level architectural thinking over knowing every line of code.
What You'll Do
* Architect and build features end-to-end across the full stack
* Develop and maintain vector embedding search and retrieval systems
* Build AI chat interfaces using agent orchestration frameworks
* Work with cloud infrastructure, databases, and caching layers
* Take ownership of your feature areas with real autonomy
* Build AI-native workflows using LLMs and structured/unstructured data
* Ship quickly, learn from users, and iterate
* Help define how we use AI across the product
* Collaborate closely with our product designer and engineering team to ship quality software
What you’ll bring
* 2+ years of professional software development experience
* Strong systems thinking – you understand how frontend, backend, APIs, databases, caches, queues, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud deployment fit together as a whole
* Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript (you must be able to read and understand JS fluently)
* Experience with some or all of: Node.js, Next.js, Prisma ORM, cloud platforms (Azure preferred)
* Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, or search infrastructure is a big plus
* Proficient at using AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Codex, or similar)
* High agency and self-motivated – you thrive with autonomy and take ownership of your work
* Comfortable working with designs in Figma
* Excellent communication skills and fluency in English
* Based in the UK
Our stack: Node.js/TypeScript, Next.js, Vercel, Mastra (agent orchestration), Azure, Pulumi (IaC), PlanetScale (MySQL), Qdrant (vector DB), ClickHouse (analytics), Prisma ORM
What we offer
* Competitive salary; £70-90k dependent on experience
* Equity participation available
* Generous holiday allowance; 28 days plus Bank Holidays and
* your birthday off!
* Wide variety of employee benefits; social team, pension, life insurance, income protection, dental plan, EV & cycle to work scheme, eye care & flu vouchers to name a few!
* Equipment; you’ll receive a fully set-up Macbook Pro laptop and any additional tech required for your work
* Fully remote with flexible working (plus option to work from our St Albans office)
* Opportunity to shape a product from the ground up
* Direct collaboration with a small, technical, experienced team
How to apply
Send the following to -
* Your CV
* A brief note on your experience with AI-assisted development and/or AI/ML infrastructure
* Links to any relevant work, GitHub, or personal projects (if applicable). We’re particularly impressed by candidates who build interesting things in their own time, so if you have side projects, demos, or experiments to share, we’d love to see them!
Hiring Process
* Screening call – A short initial call with our HR team to get to know you and make sure we’re a good fit for each other.
* Take-home coding challenge – A practical task to be completed using Claude Code, Codex, or your agentic coding tool of choice. We want to see how you work with AI-assisted development in practice. If you don’t have access to these tools, we’ll provide it for the task.
* Technical interview – A conversation about what you built, how and why you made the decisions you did, your previous experience, and your motivation for the role. This is also your chance to ask us anything.
* Final interview – A final conversation to help us make our decision. You may be up against other strong candidates at this stage, so this is your opportunity to stand out.