Strategic Overview
Senior SRE, Managed Gateways at Kong Inc. is a cloud-devops opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as 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…
The role is listed for United States with remote working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying. Relevant signals in the listing include DevOps & Infrastructure, Senior.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
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If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- 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.
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- 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.
Preferred Qualifications
- 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.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: USD 165,000 – 185,000 / yearly
Salary Benchmark
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Full Job Description
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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, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.
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).
#LI-KC1
About Kong:
Kong Inc., the AI Connectivity Company, is building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by the Fortune 500® and AI-native startups alike, Kong’s unified API and AI platform enables organizations to secure, manage, accelerate, govern, and monetize the flow of intelligence across APIs and AI traffic — on any model, any cloud. For more information, visit
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This cloud-devops opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches DevOps & Infrastructure, Senior. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Lead, mentor, and inspire a high-performing team of Site Reliability Engineers dedicated to Kong's Managed Gateway offerings. — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground DevOps & Infrastructure, Senior, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
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