Platform Engineering Manager

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.

#LI-PC1