Senior Engineering Manager - Test Function

Kong; Milano; Sur place; EUR 150 000 - 190 000; Plein temps

Résumé du poste

Kong Inc. is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead quality engineering across its runtime platforms. You will architect AI-driven testing, drive self-healing test substrates, and oversee a distributed SDET organization to deliver low-latency, high-throughput data-plane testing.

The role emphasizes shift-left governance, integration of LLMs into testing lifecycles, and collaboration with engineering and product teams to raise testability standards from design onward.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering or SDET roles.
• 4+ years in engineering management or leading distributed teams.
• Hands-on experience applying AI/LLMs or autonomous test agents to software quality workflows.
• Proven ability to manage end-to-end testing, CI/CD integration, and operational cadence.

Responsabilités

• Lead a geographically distributed SDET team across multiple regions.
• Define and execute AI-driven testing strategy across runtimes (C/Lua/Rust data planes).
• Modernize testing frameworks and CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Drive shift-left quality and governance by embedding testability in architecture.
• Define QE health metrics: automation coverage, defect density, time-to-triage, release stability.

Connaissances

SDET leadership

Engineering management

AI integration vision

Operational excellence

Outils

GitHub Actions

Docker

Kubernetes

Description du poste

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

About the Role

As the Senior Engineering Manager, you will serve as the global leader for Quality Engineering across Kong’s flagship runtime platforms (AI Gateway, API Gateway, Event Gateway and Mesh).

This is a high-visibility, transformative leadership role. Beyond overseeing our distributed global SDET organization, you will be the primary architect of Kong’s next-generation AI-driven testing strategy. You will spearhead the transformation of our quality engineering function from traditional automation to an intelligent, agentic, self-healing test substrate, using LLMs and automated prompt/agent loops to test the very infrastructure powering the AI era.

What You’ll Do

• Global Team Leadership & Operations: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing, geographically distributed team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) across North America, Europe, and Asia.

• Architect the AI Testing Strategy: Define and execute the roadmap for integrating AI, LLMs, and autonomous test agents directly into our testing lifecycle. Implement generative AI capabilities for automated test case generation, smart failure triage, self-healing test scripts, and dynamic edge-case synthesis.

• Own Runtimes Quality Strategy: Establish testing strategies for low-latency, high-throughput C/Lua/Rust data planes.

• Modernize Frameworks & CI/CD Pipelines: Oversee the architectural evolution of our end-to-end, performance, regression, and chaos-testing automation harnesses embedded within modern CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Docker, K8s).

• Shift-Left Quality & Governance: Drive quality ownership upstream. Partner closely with Software Engineering and Product Management to embed rigorous testability standards into initial architectural designs.

• Define Enterprise-Grade Metrics: Establish and monitor clear QE health indicators (e.g., CI signal reliability, automation coverage, defect density, time-to-triage, and release stability).
  

What You’ll Bring

• 10+ Years in Software Engineering / SDET: Proven track record building and scaling enterprise software test automation systems.

• 4+ Years in Engineering Management: Direct experience leading distributed or global software engineering/SDET teams.

• Hands-on AI Integration Vision: Proven experience applying LLMs, Generative AI, or autonomous agent frameworks (e.g., Model Context Protocol, agentic tool-calling, synthetic data generation) to software quality or developer workflows.

• Operational Excellence: Demonstrated ability to manage follow-the-sun operational cadence, vendor partnerships, and cross-timezone execution seamlessly.

Bonus Points

• Direct experience testing high-performance networking data planes, proxies, or API Gateways (e.g., Kong, NGINX, Envoy).

• Background in performance, chaos engineering (e.g., Gremlin, Litmus), and load testing high-availability SaaS platforms.

• Active involvement or contributions to open-source quality frameworks or AI development tooling.

About Kong:

Kong Inc., a leading developer of API and AI connectivity technologies, is building the infrastructure that powers the agentic era. Trusted by the Fortune 500 and startups alike, Kong's unified API and AI platform, Kong Konnect, enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI models. For more information, visit www.konghq.com.