Senior Software Engineering Manager (Managed Gateways SREs)

Role overview

Join Kong as a Senior Software Engineering Manager for Managed Gateways SREs. You will build and lead a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to ensure reliability, scalability, and operational excellence for Kong’s critical managed services. You’ll also be hands-on early on, contributing to critical reliability work.

Key missions

• Build the Managed Gateways SRE team (noted as Toronto) by hiring and setting high standards.
• Act as a direct contributor during early-stage critical implementations and reliability tasks.
• Lead, mentor, and develop an SRE team dedicated to Kong’s managed gateway offerings.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement robust, scalable, fault-tolerant cloud-native systems.
• Own the end-to-end operational lifecycle for managed services.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, and support teams.
• Handle critical incidents, perform root cause analysis, and implement preventative measures.
• Bring hands-on leadership to reliability and infrastructure automation.

Requirements

• Strong understanding of observability; experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry (or similar).
• Proven experience leading and managing SRE or DevOps teams in a fast-paced, high-growth environment.
• Deep expertise in designing, deploying, and operating highly available distributed systems on cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Proficiency in Golang (or similar modern languages) for infrastructure automation and service development.
• Ability to manage critical incidents, do root cause analysis, and drive preventative actions.
• Extensive hands-on experience with Kubernetes (k8s) and container orchestration in production.

Nice-to-haves

• Familiarity with API gateway technologies, service mesh, or network proxies.
• Experience contributing to open source or active participation in SRE/cloud-native communities.
• Cloud or Kubernetes certifications (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, CKA/CKAD).
• Background in developer tools, infrastructure software, or API management.