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Kong is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead Quality Engineering globally across its flagship runtime platforms: AI Gateway, API Gateway, Event Gateway, and Mesh. This is a high-visibility, transformative leadership role that combines distributed team management with strategic innovation in AI-driven testing.
You will lead a geographically distributed team of Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) across North America, Europe, and Asia. Your primary responsibilities include building and scaling enterprise-grade test automation systems, architecting Kong's next-generation AI-driven testing strategy, and transforming quality engineering from traditional automation to intelligent, agentic, self-healing test infrastructure using LLMs and autonomous agents.
Key responsibilities:
- Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing global SDET organization
- Define and execute the roadmap for integrating AI, LLMs, and autonomous test agents into the testing lifecycle
- Implement generative AI capabilities for automated test case generation, smart failure triage, self-healing test scripts, and dynamic edge-case synthesis
- Establish testing strategies for low-latency, high-throughput data planes (C/Lua/Rust)
- Modernize testing frameworks and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes)
- Drive shift-left quality practices and embed testability standards into architectural designs
- Establish enterprise-grade QE metrics and health indicators
Required qualifications:
- 10+ years in software engineering or SDET roles with proven track record building and scaling enterprise test automation systems
- 4+ years in engineering management with direct experience leading distributed or global software engineering/SDET teams
- Hands-on experience applying LLMs, generative AI, or autonomous agent frameworks to software quality or developer workflows
- Demonstrated ability to manage follow-the-sun operations, vendor partnerships, and cross-timezone execution
Bonus experience:
- Direct experience testing high-performance networking data planes, proxies, or API gateways (Kong, NGINX, Envoy)
- Background in performance engineering, chaos engineering, and load testing high-availability SaaS platforms
- Active involvement in open-source quality frameworks or AI development tooling
