Senior SRE, Managed Gateways

Kong; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Kong Inc. is seeking a Senior SRE for Managed Gateways to own reliability and scalability of a global SaaS platform.

You’ll work as the technical face of the product for enterprise customers, guiding deployments from kickoff to live production with a focus on resilience and performance. In this role you will lead a team of SREs, design cloud-native systems across AWS/GCP/Azure using Kubernetes and Golang, and drive automation, monitoring, and incident practices that reduce toil while maintaining

Qualifications

• Extensive experience as an SRE for highly available distributed systems.
• Deep Kubernetes and multi-cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) expertise.
• Proficiency in Golang for automation and tooling.
• Strong CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practice (Terraform, Ansible).

Responsibilities

• Own production reliability for the Managed Gateways platform.
• Architect and implement scalable, fault-tolerant cloud-native systems.
• Define and monitor SLOs/SLIs; lead incident response and post-mortems.
• Collaborate with Product, Eng, and Customer Success on roadmaps.
• Drive automation and self-service tooling for deployments.

Skills

Kubernetes

Golang

Cloud-native architectures

CI/CD pipelines

API gateways

Monitoring & alerting

Distributed systems

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK stack

Datadog

Job description

Are you ready to unlock intelligence?

Senior SRE, Managed Gateways

About the Role:

Kong’s Managed Gateways is the fastest-growing product in the Kong portfolio, a SaaS offering with ARR growing multifold. As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Managed Gateways, you’ll be instrumental in architecting and maintaining the resilient, scalable infrastructure that powers Kong’s mission-critical managed services — and you’ll be the technical face of that product for the enterprise customers who depend on it, directly ensuring the reliability and performance that lets them build the next generation of connected applications at global scale.

What You’ll Do:

Cloud Gateways is a complex, multi-cloud problem — supported across AWS, GCP, and Azure — and our enterprise customers run large, often unique topologies. This role carries two equally deep engineering mandates: owning production reliability for the platform, and acting as the senior technical authority who takes an enterprise customer from kickoff to a fully successful, live implementation.

Platform & Reliability Engineering

• Lead, mentor, and inspire a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers dedicated to Kong’s Managed Gateway offerings.
• Architect and implement robust, scalable, and fault-tolerant cloud-native systems using technologies like Kubernetes, Golang, and major cloud providers.
• Own the end-to-end operational lifecycle, from proactive monitoring and alerting to incident response and blameless post-mortems, ensuring continuous service improvement.
• Drive a culture of developer delight by implementing automation, self-service tooling, and streamlined workflows for deploying and managing API gateways.
• Define, track, and report on key SLOs and SLIs to ensure optimal performance and reliability of Managed Gateways.
• Champion technical debt prevention and advocate for architectural best practices that enhance system resilience and reduce operational toil.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, engineering, and Customer Success to influence roadmap decisions and ensure operational readiness for new features.

Enterprise Implementation Engineering

• Partner directly with enterprise customers — working alongside Product leadership, Professional Services, and Customer Success — to drive end-to-end onboarding and implementation of Cloud Gateways, and productize recurring implementation patterns into repeatable playbooks and platform capabilities.
• Bring deep, cross-cloud breadth (AWS, GCP, Azure) to handle unique customer topologies and turn complex setups into successful, production-ready deployments.
• Serve as the technical owner of the customer relationship through implementation, primarily supporting our North America customer base, and be the escalation point Customer Success leans on for technically complex accounts.
• Feed real-world implementation patterns and customer constraints back to Product to further contribute the roadmap.

What You’ll Bring

The Toolkit

• Extensive experience as a Site Reliability Engineer, focusing on highly available and distributed systems.
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures, preferably across multiple public cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Strong proficiency in Golang or similar modern programming languages for automation and tool development.
• Proven track record in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible).
• In-depth knowledge of monitoring, logging, and alerting systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog).
• Experience with managed services, API gateways, or similar network infrastructure is highly desirable.

The Kong DNA

• You take immense ownership of your systems, treating reliability as a first-class feature.
• You operate with a sense of urgency, especially in critical situations, and drive quick, effective resolutions.
• You thrive in a collaborative environment, actively sharing knowledge and elevating the entire team.
• Kong moves fast, and our team’s spread across continents and time zones — plans shift mid-flight, and things don’t always line up neatly. You don’t need everything settled to do good work. You bring your own calm to the noise, figure things out as you go, and help the people around you do the same.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Service Mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd).
• Familiarity with database administration for high-throughput systems (PostgreSQL, Cassandra).
• Contributions to open-source SRE tools or projects.
• Relevant cloud certifications (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, CKA).

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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.