Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Volcano

Kong; United States; Remote; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong is hiring a Senior SRE for Volcano, an internal developer platform. You will own reliability end-to-end, define SLOs, and drive incident response across edge deployments, managed Postgres, auth, realtime, and storage services.

You will collaborate with OCTO and engineering leadership to shape the platform's reliability posture and security requirements. This role focuses on building multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure, GitOps/CI/CD backbones, and observability from day one to support

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent discipline.
• Proven track record as SRE/Platform engineer for developer-facing platforms or greenfield projects.
• Experience designing multi-tenant Kubernetes infrastructure and reliability practices.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end reliability for Volcano, defining SLOs and incident response.
• Design multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure and networking for edge deployments.
• Build GitOps/CI/CD backbones using ArgoCD, Helm, Terraform/Terragrunt.
• Scale and harden managed data services like PostgreSQL and Redis.
• Instrument services with SLIs and create dashboards with Datadog/Prometheus/Grafana.
• Collaborate with OCTO, security, and product engineering to bake reliability in from the start.
• Evaluate emerging tech for edge runtimes, serverless compute, and AI-native infra.

Skills

SRE leadership

Kubernetes

Platform engineering

Incident response

Education

BS in Computer Science

Tools

ArgoCD

Helm

Terraform/Terragrunt

Datadog

Prometheus

Grafana

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job description

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.

About The Role:

Kong is building Project Volcano, an internal developer platform purpose-built for Kong's engineering ecosystem. Volcano will provide teams with on-demand preview environments, edge deployments, managed PostgreSQL, auth, realtime, and storage APIs all deeply integrated with Kong products. As the Senior SRE for Volcano, you will be the reliability voice for this platform. This role is a strategic initiative driven by the Office of the CTO (OCTO). You will partner directly with engineering leadership to define the platform's reliability posture. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role with direct influence on Kong's next generation developer platform.

What You’ll Do:

• Own reliability for Volcano end-to-end: Define and drive SLOs, error budgets, and incident response practices for all Volcano services — edge deployments, managed Postgres, auth, realtime, storage, and the control plane.
• Contribute to the platform's infrastructure: Design and build the multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure, networking, and data plane that powers Volcano's edge deployment pipeline and backend-as-a-service capabilities.
• Build the GitOps and CI/CD backbone: Establish deployment automation, canary pipelines, and preview environment provisioning using ArgoCD, Helm, and Terraform/Terragrunt — setting patterns the broader team will follow.
• Scale managed data services: Design, operate, and harden multi-tenant PostgreSQL clusters, Redis caching layers, and object storage — with a focus on data isolation, performance, and disaster recovery.
• Drive observability from day one: Instrument every Volcano service with meaningful SLIs; build dashboards, alerts, and runbooks using Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana before services go live, not after incidents.
• Lead cross-functional reliability work: Collaborate with the OCTO team, product engineering, and security to bake reliability and compliance into Volcano's architecture — not bolt it on later.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies: Given Volcano's greenfield nature, evaluate and make architectural decisions on edge runtimes, serverless compute, vector databases, and AI-native infrastructure components.

What You’ll Bring:

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent; substantial experience at Staff or Principal IC level in SRE/Platform Engineering.
• Proven track record building SRE or platform engineering practices for developer-facing platforms or PaaS/SaaS products — ideally at greenfield stage.
• Kubernetes expertise: multi-tenant cluster design, networking (CNI, service mesh, ingress), autoscaling, and security hardening.
• #LI-BR2

About Kong:

Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortun