Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Volcano
Own the reliability of Kong's Project Volcano, a developer platform, while collaborating with engineering leadership.
Posted by employer 5 days ago
First seen on Joblaze 4 days ago
Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago
Skills & Technologies
What you'll build
- Define and drive SLOs and incident response practices for Volcano services
- Design and build multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure
- Establish deployment automation and canary pipelines
- Design and operate multi-tenant PostgreSQL clusters
- Instrument Volcano services with SLIs and build dashboards
Must have
- 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
- Kubernetes expertise
Requirements
- Education
- Bachelor's degree
Not disclosed in this posting: compensation, years of experience, work arrangement, visa sponsorship.
Joblaze summary
In the role of Senior Site Reliability Engineer for Project Volcano at Kong, the individual is responsible for ensuring the reliability of a new internal developer platform by defining service-level objectives and managing incident response. Key skills include expertise in Kubernetes, GitOps, and CI/CD practices, alongside a strong background in SRE or platform engineering, particularly in greenfield environments. This position is suited for experienced professionals at the Staff or Principal level who have a proven track record in building reliable systems for developer-facing platforms.
Joblaze insights
- Listed 4 days ago — first seen on Joblaze September 26, 2026. Last confirmed on Kong's careers page September 29, 2026.
- Kubernetes appears in 68.1% of 185 comparable senior devops/sre roles in United States; Argo CD appears in 4.3% of 185 comparable senior devops/sre roles in United States.
Quick facts
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: ArgoCD, Datadog, Grafana, Helm, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Kong targets senior candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Volcano role at Kong.
From the original posting
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
Standard company text repeated across Kong's postings is omitted here.