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Kong is building Project Volcano, an internal developer platform designed for Kong's engineering ecosystem. Volcano will provide teams with on-demand preview environments, edge deployments, managed PostgreSQL, auth, realtime, and storage APIs deeply integrated with Kong products. This is a strategic initiative driven by the Office of the CTO (OCTO).
As the Senior SRE for Volcano, you will be the reliability voice for this platform, partnering 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.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own reliability for Volcano end-to-end: Define and drive SLOs, error budgets, and incident response practices for all Volcano services including edge deployments, managed Postgres, auth, realtime, storage, and the control plane.
- Contribute to platform 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 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.
- Lead cross-functional reliability work: Collaborate with the OCTO team, product engineering, and security to bake reliability and compliance into Volcano's architecture.
- 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.
Kong Inc. is the AI Connectivity Company, building the connectivity layer of AI. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies and AI-native startups, 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 and any cloud.
Requirements:
- 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
