The job, in the employer's words
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The Mission
Kong Cloud Gateways is Kong's foundational cloud-native SaaS platform, powering its managed API and AI Gateway offerings. It provides a multi-tenant control plane, automation, and platform services that let customers securely deploy, operate, and scale dedicated gateway infrastructure with the simplicity of a fully managed cloud service. Behind that experience sits a distributed platform responsible for provisioning, fleet management, software lifecycle, zero-downtime upgrades, observability, security, and multi-region operations across globally distributed cloud infrastructure - built to a target of 99.99% availability, balancing reliability, performance, operational excellence, and infrastructure efficiency at global SaaS scale.
As a Software Engineering Manager for Managed Gateways Infrastructure, you will own and grow Kong's Bangalore-based engineering team, taking full accountability for this multi-tenant SaaS platform. Kong Cloud Gateways is growing 100% YoY, and as enterprises increasingly adopt AI alongside traditional APIs, this platform becomes an increasingly important part of Kong's API and AI strategy - every improvement in automation, scalability, and operational excellence you drive accelerates new platform capabilities and lets product teams innovate faster. Beyond the technical charter, you play a key role in shaping a dynamic engineering culture - one built on urgency, ownership, and first-principles thinking - as the team scales to match the pace of the business.
This is a highly technical, hands-on leadership role - you're expected to stay close to the systems, dig into hard problems alongside your team, and not hesitate to get into the trenches when it matters.
What You'll Do
Own and grow Kong's Managed Gateways Infrastructure engineering team in Bangalore - scaling the team's capability, raising the technical bar, and staying hands-on in critical implementations and incidents, not just directing from a distance.
Own the reliability and scalability of a multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure platform serving customers across regions and clouds - every architectural decision has to hold up under multi-tenant load, isolation, and blast-radius considerations, not just single-tenant assumptions.
Drive 4-9s (99.99%+) availability across Kong's global infrastructure footprint - owning capacity, resilience, and failure-mode design across multi-region, multi-cloud deployments (AWS, Azure, GCP) so Cloud Gateways stays up for customers everywhere, at any scale.
Act as a direct technical contributor when it counts - complex incidents, architecture reviews, and high-stakes implementations that materially move the needle on Managed Gateways' growth and reliability.
Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team building and operating Kong's SaaS infrastructure for Managed Gateways, in direct support of our critical enterprise customer base globally.
Architect and implement robust, scalable, and fault-tolerant cloud-native systems using technologies like Kubernetes, Golang, and major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).
Own the complete operational lifecycle end-to-end - infrastructure, reliability, on-call, incident response, and blameless post-mortems - as one integrated engineering charter, not a separate function.
Drive developer delight and operational efficiency through automation, self-service tooling, and streamlined workflows for deploying and managing API gateways, while proactively preventing technical debt and reducing operational toil.
Define, track, and report on key SLOs and SLIs, and advocate for architectural best practices that keep Managed Gateways performant and resilient as it scales.
Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, engineering, and support teams to influence roadmap decisions and ensure operational readiness for new features.
What You'll Bring
The Toolkit:
Proven experience leading and managing software engineering teams responsible for infrastructure and reliability in a fast-paced, high-growth environment, with a track record of staying technically hands-on rather than purely delegating.
Deep, current expertise in designing, deploying, and operating highly available distributed systems on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) - this role needs someone who can still open a terminal and debug production, not just review architecture diagrams.
Extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes (k8s) and container orchestration in production environments.
Proficiency in Golang or similar modern programming languages for infrastructure automation and service development.
Strong understanding of observability principles and experience with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar.
Demonstrated ability to manage critical incidents personally when needed, perform root cause analysis, and implement effective preventative measures.
Familiarity with API gateway technologies, service mesh, or network proxies is a significant plus.
The Kong DNA:
Ownership: You take full responsibility for the reliability and performance of systems, driving initiatives from conception to completion.
Urgency: You thrive in dynamic environments, prioritizing critical issues and delivering impactful solutions with speed and precision.
Collaboration: You build strong relationships, foster open communication, and work effectively across global teams to achieve shared goals.
Bonus Points
Experience with open-source contributions or active participation in SRE/cloud-native communities.
Certifications in cloud platforms (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer) or Kubernetes (e.g., CKA, CKAD).
Background in companies focused on developer tools, infrastructure software, or API management.
About Kong:
Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.
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